Rydia is an undersocialized teenager who literally forgot how to do white magic during training; her strongest powers are "I'm calling my dad" and "I'm calling my dad's god," but ultimately out of all these characters she is the closest we have to a 'platonic' mage who only casts spells and calls on summon. She is also the only mage in this list capable of casting Meteor, though it takes her until a very high level to learn it; from this we can conclude that Rydia is Potential Girl, and people on the Internet in powerscaling arguments will forever say that "man when Rydia reaches her full power she will be the strongest of all!!!" even though she never does reach full power. I hear she's been cast for a role in Jujutsu Kaisen.
Lenna is, like all V protagonists, a black box whose specific skill set could be anything. As a Freelancer, she might have the abilities of all the game's jobs: Monk HP and Strength, both black and white magic, summoning, and dualcast (though not all of those at the same time). Her power ceiling is therefore extremely high - however, she lacks a killer instinct, and as a mage FFV is not the game where magic is the strongest. She cannot hope to defeat Y'Shtola, who is a catgirl, due to her affinity for animals. There is, however, a non-zero chance of her opponent being eaten by a wind drake.
Terra is natively a mage, and then powers up significantly over the course of the game. As a Magitek Elite, she has the best-rounded skillset of anyone outside Lenna, being both a capable physical fighter with a wide array of available equipment and a wizard, and then she gets to sip on Esper juice for the rest of the game, jacking up her stats to unbelievable peaks. As if that were not enough, her Trance allows her to enter a super form that makes her even more powerful. She is also the first character on this list (and, I believe, only one outside Squall) to be capable of casting Ultima, which she does learn before the end of the game if you do your Esper hunting properly. On paper, she's an easy win. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy VI is the only game so far to feature "magic goes away and our characters lose all their immense magical power" as an explicit plot point. This means Terra is dropped into this match with nothing but her sword and gets promptly annihilated.
Squall is the only one of these characters to have a real killer instinct. In fact, his entire personality is built around how good he is at killing people and how bad he is at everything else. Out of all these characters, he most has that dog in him (the dog is a lion). But does he have the power to back it up? Short answer: Yes. Due to FF8 mechanics, Squall being the sole member of his party means he can just hoover up all the spells and GFs like a human vacuum and Junction everything to himself, attaining absolute power. He has every spell, every summon, every ability, and can Draw Magic from his enemies. In fact, he can probably steal Lenna and Terra's summons! Unfortunately, he will not be winning this match, as he has already wandered off the arena to play Triple Triad with random audience members. These cards will later be Refined into even more powerful spells to jack up Squall's stats even higher, but by that time he'll have already lost to a ringout. He will say something dismissive about tournaments being frivolous affairs for babies and question whether Rydia's Flare would work 'in the streets.'
This leaves Y'Shtola. In theory, she is one of the most powerful Conjurers on the Source. In practice, she has never won a single cutscene battle, and lives in a universe where she is doomed to see the WoL hog every single good job while the rest of the cast are left with base classes that are obsolete by lv 50. This shit is so bad, she had to go to an entire separate world to acquire Black Mage With The Serial Numbers Filed Off. She immediately proceeded to lose a cutscene fight again. Her prospects are grim, but she has one unexpected asset going for her: Legions of Internet simps. Y'Shtola is widely considered so hot she bargained herself a position as XIV's official ambassador in every FFXIV crossover, replacing the player character due to the Warrior of Light's lack of fixed canonical appearance. This is facilitated by the fact that Y'Shtola is exactly the same person she is on the day that you meet her as she is 200 hours of award-winning story content later, enjoying an existence blissfully free of 'character arc.' You never have to wonder which Y'Shtola you're getting, she is always the same, and always will be. Can a thousand horny fanartists compensate for her lacking magical abilities? It's a fair question.
The way I see it going, Terra goes down first under a swarm of simps due to having lost her magical abilities. Lenna and Rydia do well at first, but Rydia is too frail for a sustained fight and Lenna is too afraid to kill; Y'Shtola blasts them both while they're trying to keep the swarm at bay. Unfortunately, just as she stands on the cusp of winning, Squall has Irvine shoot her with a sniper rifle from outside the arena. Squall is immediately disqualified a second time for unsportsmanlike behavior. The win is awarded by default to Maria Final Fantasy II, whom everyone had forgotten was in the running. Y'Shtola makes a full recovery owing to the millions Squeenix are willing to spend on medical care for the representative of their biggest cash cow while Final Fantasy VI still hasn't gotten a remake; she is later cancelled on Twitter over allegations of using skin whitening products.
Rydia drops Bahamut on the competition doing heavy damage to everyone and paralyzing the other three women with Bahamut- and dragon-related PTSD. (the fall of Dalamud, death of the wind drake, and massacre of the summons, respectively)
Squall then taps out when he realizes she has a whip and identifies her as an authority figure.
Rydia is an undersocialized teenager who literally forgot how to do white magic during training; her strongest powers are "I'm calling my dad" and "I'm calling my dad's god," but ultimately out of all these characters she is the closest we have to a 'platonic' mage who only casts spells and calls on summon. She is also the only mage in this list capable of casting Meteor, though it takes her until a very high level to learn it; from this we can conclude that Rydia is Potential Girl, and people on the Internet in powerscaling arguments will forever say that "man when Rydia reaches her full power she will be the strongest of all!!!" even though she never does reach full power. I hear she's been cast for a role in Jujutsu Kaisen.
Lenna is, like all V protagonists, a black box whose specific skill set could be anything. As a Freelancer, she might have the abilities of all the game's jobs: Monk HP and Strength, both black and white magic, summoning, and dualcast (though not all of those at the same time). Her power ceiling is therefore extremely high - however, she lacks a killer instinct, and as a mage FFV is not the game where magic is the strongest. She cannot hope to defeat Y'Shtola, who is a catgirl, due to her affinity for animals. There is, however, a non-zero chance of her opponent being eaten by a wind drake.
Terra is natively a mage, and then powers up significantly over the course of the game. As a Magitek Elite, she has the best-rounded skillset of anyone outside Lenna, being both a capable physical fighter with a wide array of available equipment and a wizard, and then she gets to sip on Esper juice for the rest of the game, jacking up her stats to unbelievable peaks. As if that were not enough, her Trance allows her to enter a super form that makes her even more powerful. She is also the first character on this list (and, I believe, only one outside Squall) to be capable of casting Ultima, which she does learn before the end of the game if you do your Esper hunting properly. On paper, she's an easy win. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy VI is the only game so far to feature "magic goes away and our characters lose all their immense magical power" as an explicit plot point. This means Terra is dropped into this match with nothing but her sword and gets promptly annihilated.
Squall is the only one of these characters to have a real killer instinct. In fact, his entire personality is built around how good he is at killing people and how bad he is at everything else. Out of all these characters, he most has that dog in him (the dog is a lion). But does he have the power to back it up? Short answer: Yes. Due to FF8 mechanics, Squall being the sole member of his party means he can just hoover up all the spells and GFs like a human vacuum and Junction everything to himself, attaining absolute power. He has every spell, every summon, every ability, and can Draw Magic from his enemies. In fact, he can probably steal Lenna and Terra's summons! Unfortunately, he will not be winning this match, as he has already wandered off the arena to play Triple Triad with random audience members. These cards will later be Refined into even more powerful spells to jack up Squall's stats even higher, but by that time he'll have already lost to a ringout. He will say something dismissing about tournaments being frivolous affairs for babies and question whether Rydia's Flare would work 'in the streets.'
This leaves Y'Shtola. In theory, she is one of the most powerful Conjurers on the Source. In practice, she has never won a single cutscene battle, and lives in a universe where she is doomed to see the WoL hog every single good job while the rest of the cast are left with base classes that are obsolete by lv 50. This shit is so bad, she had to go to an entire separate world to acquire Black Mage With The Serial Numbers Filed Off. She immediately proceeded to lose a cutscene fight again. Her prospects are grim, but she has one unexpected asset going for her: Legions of Internet simps. Y'Shtola is widely considered so hot she bargained herself a position as XIV's official ambassador in every FFXIV crossover, replacing the player character due to the Warrior of Light's lack of fixed canonical appearance. This is facilitated by the fact that Y'Shtola is exactly the same person she is on the day that you meet her as she is 200 hours of award-winning story content later, enjoying an existence blissfully free of 'character arc.' You never have to wonder which Y'Shtola you're getting, she is always the same, and always will be. Can a thousand horny fanartists compensate for her lacking magical abilities? It's a fair question.
The way I see it going, Terra goes down first under a swarm of simps due to having lost her magical abilities. Lenna and Rydia do well at first, but Rydia is too frail for a sustained fight and Lenna is too afraid to kill; Y'Shtola blasts them both while they're trying to keep the swarm at bay. Unfortunately, just as she stands on the cusp of winning, Squall has Irvine shoot her with a sniper rifle from outside the arena. Squall is immediately disqualified a second time for unsportsmanlike behavior. The win is awarded by default to Maria Final Fantasy II, whom everyone had forgotten was in the running. Y'Shtola makes a full recovery owing to the millions Squeenix are willing to spend on medical care for the representative of their biggest cash cow while Final Fantasy VI still hasn't gotten a remake; she is later cancelled on Twitter over allegations of using skin whitening products.
An alternate joke for Terra would be that she has overleveled her magic stat, causing integer overflows when she casts Ultima to reduce it to pitiful levels of damage.
Don't know if Pixel Remaster fixed that or the Vanish/Doom combo.
Squall is the only one of these characters to have a real killer instinct. In fact, his entire personality is built around how good he is at killing people and how bad he is at everything else. Out of all these characters, he most has that dog in him (the dog is a lion). But does he have the power to back it up? Short answer: Yes. Due to FF8 mechanics, Squall being the sole member of his party means he can just hoover up all the spells and GFs like a human vacuum and Junction everything to himself, attaining absolute power. He has every spell, every summon, every ability, and can Draw Magic from his enemies. In fact, he can probably steal Lenna and Terra's summons! Unfortunately, he will not be winning this match, as he has already wandered off the arena to play Triple Triad with random audience members. These cards will later be Refined into even more powerful spells to jack up Squall's stats even higher, but by that time he'll have already lost to a ringout. He will say something dismissing about tournaments being frivolous affairs for babies and question whether Rydia's Flare would work 'in the streets.'
It's not supposed to be a deathmatch, guys. Can someone tell Squall that before something happens?
Final Fantasy V, part 1
This game was a lot longer than the prior ones, so I'm not going to clump all my random thoughts in one post. I'm about halfway through Omicron's Let's Play right now (part 14 to be precise), and so far I'm really enjoying this one.
I realize that, for every FF game except 1, Omicron's screenshots and narration only provide an abridged outline of the story and characters. There's a lot of texture missing. FF5 is the first time I don't think that matters. Between the quality of the characters' dialogue (and its translation), the expressive sprites, and a tone that relies more on gags and less on moments of pensive silence, I got a sense of the main characters way sooner and more clearly than prior Final Fantasy recaps. The way crystals keep shattering no matter what the player does is absolutely frustrating, but aside from that disconnect between actions and outcome, it's an engaging enough story, with presentation that was impossible two games ago and barely attempted in FF4.
There are a lot of factors confounding my analysis, but I feel reasonably confident that FF5 is handling its story (and arguably gameplay) better than any of the prior FF games. And each of those games was a significant improvement over the last, if we give FF2's story enough credit to make up for its awkward leveling system and magic. (And the original FF1 had jank rivaling the original Pokemon games. Wisdom is not a mechanic.) Also, from what I've heard of FF6, it's the best of the SNES Finals Fantasy.
And FF7...well, it's the only game in the series that non-fans regularly reference, the only one that consistently shows up in crossovers, the one that got a bunch of spin-off material that completely missed the point of the main character and defined the average American's understanding of an archetypical JRPG hero. It didn't get popular purely by demerit of the spinoffs and stuff, it got the spinoffs because it was good. I'm not going to argue that it was better than the Final Fantasy game you played as a kid, but I will argue that a lot of other people think it's better.
The point I'm getting at is that, as far as I can tell, Final Fantasy went seven mainline games without producing one that was clearly worse than its predecessor. Six times when the team succeeded in making a better version of the game they'd just made. That's impressive. Most game series make their first flop within 3-4 games; Final Fantasy goes twice that long, if you don't count that FF4 sequel and agree that FF2 figuring out how to tell a story more than makes up for its steps backwards in gameplay.But those seem like reasonable caveats to me.
Aside from that...FF5 seems like a more intentionally comedic game than the others in the series. It seemed like FF2-4 were trying to be as serious and gritty of stories as their engine limitations allowed, with FF1's tone being flattened by said limitations. I would not be surprised if the Final Fantasy community circa 1992 had a lot of arguments about this, but I like it. Keeping the tone light makes the few dramatic moments hit harder, and having relatively few dramatic moments means they get more buildup and stronger presentation.
You see, the big innovation that changes everything is that the jobs can now be combined. In FF3, a dragoon is a dragoon is a dragoon. Each job has a job level, but it has a relatively minor impact on your character and doesn't affect other jobs in any way. Meanwhile in FFV, jobs have more abilities - both Commands and 'support' abilities, which have passive effects like 'Run faster,' and these abilities are learned as you advance your jobs. But not just that; each job can equip abilities you've learned from another job. So for instance, you can make a classic FF1-style Paladin without advanced jobs by equipping your Knight with White Magic learned from the WHM job.
Awesome!
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: I don't see the point in letting one character switch between many jobs/classes/whatever if they only get to be one at a time. Being able to mix and match job abilities adds depth and customization to character progression. Not being able to do that is boring, and makes switching between classes less appealing.
…and now Galuf is a Monk who can cast lv 1 White Magic spells. Which are the only ones available at this level, so I don't lose anything (I do lose something, in that Monk has a bad magic stat, but that's a secondary concern here). And I do the same with Faris and lv 1 Black Magic. Now I have a party of three monks dealing massive physical damage and who can still fall back on magic when I need to cast Cure or target an elemental weakness.
Of course I don't mean to stick with this for too long, the point is only to still have two pseudo-mages while I train Galuf and Faris to learn the Monk's Barehanded ability and swap them back to mages who now can also cast FIST.
The improved job system is the thing that really jumps out at me about FF5's mechanics. FF1 and 4 had jobs as static, immutable aspects of a character. FF3 made them basically tools you could pick up individually or throw aside, tools one character might be better at, but they're just situational tools. FF2 had a bit of character customization, just...unforgivably wonky. FF5 combines the character build strategizing stuff from FF2 and the functional framework for RPG combat from 3/4, and it seems like the best progression system the series had up until that point.
The player in me is a bit disappointed that you're so limited in how you can mix-and-match class abilities. The game designer in me recognizes that this was probably necessary to force the player to make build decisions instead of just making everyone a monk-beastmaster-ninja-cannoneer-mysticknight-thief-dragoon-omnimage-samurai-bard. It also made balancing the whole system less implausible.
On one hand, a lot of the disjointed plot feels like what you'd get if you literally adapted a D&D campaign into a video game.
On the other hand, D&D isn't very popular in Japan. I hear the most popular TRPG over there is Call of Cthulhu, but that's obviously the wrong genre. Sword World is more plausible.
...as well as a 'Greenhorn's Club' which contains a bunch of old dude sprites, who inform us about classic mechanics for newcomers ('Cure hurts the undead') and new ones (Thieves have a Find Passage ability!)
Oh, that's neat. (gets on soapbox)
Thieves in video games (and recent editions of D&D)(and a lot of non-game fantasy stories)(and the D&D edition I started with if I'm being honest) often suffer from being reduced to the combat function grafted onto them so the sneaky guy can do something when the fighting-man lives up to his name. They're basically just assassins with a more mundane job title, and sometimes they notice traps. That's not what a thief is.
Ideally, thieves should be a noncombat role first and foremost. Think Dungeon Meshi's Chilchuck. He can fight when he needs to, but he's not as good at it as Marcille or Laios or even Senshi, and he resents being forced into combat. Chilchuck's value to the team (aside from being a part-time voice of reason) comes between fights. He navigates hostile passages of the dungeon without setting off traps, he finds secret doors, he identifies patterns in how the dungeon shifts, he listens for ambushes. All important jobs, all of which require skills that don't help much in a normal fight.
Yeah, it's harder to balance classes who are good in different situations than classes who are good at different aspects of the same situation. And for video games, it's hard to find a place for a noncombat class when your core gameplay loop revolves around combat. But I'm glad FF5 tried.
Did anyone else play AdventureQuest or its prequel DragonFable?
AQ had sections where you fought underwater monsters underwater with no explanation. DF later/earlier had you go on a quest where some pirates hire you to secure their secret cargo of water-breathing potions from ninja invaders, because "Pirates vs. Ninjas" was a popular motif in the oughts for some reason. And at the end...
Captain Rhubarb said:
What did ye do with the bomb that I gave ye?
(distant nautical explosion)
Nevermind. I think I can guess...
*sigh*
Now... Not only do we NOT have the potions to sell but with all that Water Breathing Potion in the ocean...NO ONE WILL NEED WATER BREATHING POTIONS EVER AGAIN! THEY CAN JUST... JUST BREATHE THE OCEAN!
**Deep breath***
Oh well, at least the ninjas didn't get them either. I'll just tell Captain Blackberry that they blew up the ship.
I find that slip of the tongue - "a lad, er, lass" - fascinating, because it's pretty clear Faris has some Gender going on. Like, other people going forward seem to be referring to Faris as "her," and she doesn't object, so I'm gonna use she/her as well, but also, like… She clearly doesn't mind being treated as a man, and in fact seems to prefer it by default. She also doesn't react with hostility to being gendered differently by the rest of the group. I get the feeling that the pat way she's explaining it - "I grew up in a masculine environment so I dressed up as a man so I wouldn't be made fun of for being a woman, and if you make fun of me I'll shank you" - is kind of like… A simpler, let's-avoid-a-big-conversation explanation for the benefits of other people that hide a more complicated relationship to her own gender identity.
I never thought I'd see a "This guy is actually a GIRL?!" reveal that had any actual substance. I'd be surprised if this went anywhere, but I bet trans people write interesting fanfiction about Faris.
Also, kinda bugs me that the game is undermining Fari's gender presentation in the job sprites - it's giving a tiger outfit to the girls and a wolf outfit to the boys, and the one that's clearly drawing from Minwu (very based choice btw) for the boys has both Lenna and Faris in femme outfits, with a ponytail and jewelry and everything.
"Exdeath" is kind of an incredible name. I can't not read it as X-Death. Like, dude called himself Superkill. It is either an incredible statement of threat, or the most self-aggrandizing edginess I've seen in this series.
I read it as self-aggrandizing edginess, but that might just be because it reminds me of a villainess from an edgy, aggressively mediocre anime my brother recommended to me. (I have not forgiven him for that slight. Especially since he keeps sleeping on my recommendations of universally-acclaimed anime, including stuff that is self-evidently his speed like Chainsaw Man. You don't have to appreciate the themes, just read/watch it for the guy who turns into chainsaws!)
So the reason Galuf survived being so closed to a meteorite impact is that he was never at the impact site in the first place. He was in the meteorite, riding it down to earth.
According to Impact Earth!, that would actually make things worse. Peak overpressure is listed as infinity pascals, radiant flux is NaN m/s, and the sound intensity is infinite (dangerously Loud) (obviously). I suspect that nobody who programmed this web page spent much time on divide-by-zero errors.
"I remember everything now!"
"Di—Did you forget something?" (80% of the reason I wrote this skit is how amusing I think it is that Krile is completely out of the loop with regard to Galuf's amnesia, which she is instrumental in curing.)
"You kept getting in trouble with my son for taking his meteor for joyrides!"
"Um, no, I think you..ah...imagined that!"
"Young lady, I don't think that's your meteor in the crater."
He has a giant hologram machine which he uses to threaten our friends by gloating over holding us hostage? Incredible. What a guy. I see that the writers decided to jettison 'character depth' as unnecessary weight and to replace them with four-color supervillain clichés, and Exdeath is living it.
Jettison anything that wasn't working right, replace it with goofs and clichés. Anywhere earlier FFs failed to be dramatic, FF5 tries to be comedic, or at least silly.
Well, the moment I step out of the cave myself, it becomes obvious: that path was designed to avoid desert tiles. The moogle circled around them travelling exclusively through plains and forest.
The conclusion is relatively straightforward: there is Bad New in the desert and I should avoid it.
Which is of course why the first thing I do is set foot in it.
Well. Lesson learned. I shall simply reload, follow the trail the moogle laid out, and avoid dealing with that horrible thing. Frustrating, but easily solved.
…
NOT.
We quickly head towards the top level where the dragons is lying sick, but before we can get there, a handmaid runs to us and says that Krile complained of a headache and suddenly collapsed! We rush to her bedside, where she lies in a haggard state, struggling to speak.
...
No, Bartz, she didn't "forget," she's just Being A Lenna About It. And it works - giving the drake the example of eating the grass (which actually is toxic to her) to reassure him that it is safe to eat (which it is, for him), works in convincing him to eat it and heal his wounds… just in time for Lenna to collapse from her own intoxication. The irony running through this entire scene is… delicious.
...
Of course, this is extremely hypocritical of Krile, Little Miss Bed-Ridden Who Just Ran Up A Bunch Of Stairs, who promptly also collapses.
Does no one in this stupid castle know how to cast Esuna??? Actually, could this whole sidequest have been avoided with a quick Cura? Does human-grade healing magic work on dragons?
To clarify, it was absolutely a bug in FF1; part of the first continent extended a few spaces into a tile occupied by a high-level continent. But it was a bug people liked, so it was remade intentionally in future FF games, partly because it was useful and partly as a reference to the original Peninsula of Power.
Y'all must know some youthful 50-year-olds. I've seen too many people in their 40's with aggressively-graying hair to guess someone without a grain of salt visible in their hair is older than 40.
The point I'm getting at is that, as far as I can tell, Final Fantasy went seven mainline games without producing one that was clearly worse than its predecessor. Six times when the team succeeded in making a better version of the game they'd just made. That's impressive. Most game series make their first flop within 3-4 games; Final Fantasy goes twice that long, if you don't count that FF4 sequel and agree that FF2 figuring out how to tell a story more than makes up for its steps backwards in gameplay. But those seem like reasonable caveats to me.
Being fair in the case of the FFIV sequel, it wasn't a directly released sequel, it actually came out in 2008 - sometime after Final Fantasy Twelve, by which point the series was already well into its decline/hitting its peak before it's eventual decline/still going strong (opinions are forever mixed on where Final Fantasy "peaks" let's be honest).
Anyways point is by the metric of actual release dates Final Fantasy was still hit after hit up through at least Final Fantasy VII. Unless we count Mystic Quest, in which case the series peaked there, obviously.
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: I don't see the point in letting one character switch between many jobs/classes/whatever if they only get to be one at a time. Being able to mix and match job abilities adds depth and customization to character progression. Not being able to do that is boring, and makes switching between classes less appealing.
Word. Nothing against the FFIII job system, but being able to mix and match and grab stuff from multiple jobs is easily the best part of any job system. Heck, even Dragon Quest III apparently knew this because it had a whole reclass system where a character gets reset to Level 1 in a new class, but keeps half their stats and any spells they knew. I may or may not have a save file with a Martial Artist who also knows almost every spell in the game.
And of course beyond FFV, other games would go on to innovate with things like more slots than just one, like Final Fantasy Tactics, Bravely Default, or iirc one of the later DQ games I haven't played yet has some really crazy job mixing.
Damn that's a deep cut, they've been around for what 20+ years now? And both still exist even, I downloaded the Artix Game Launcher last year for some nostalgia and there my old-ass accounts were.
Does no one in this stupid castle know how to cast Esuna??? Actually, could this whole sidequest have been avoided with a quick Cura? Does human-grade healing magic work on dragons?
Well, it is high level White Magic, maybe they don't have any White Mages that can cast it?
Or more seriously, while Cure or Esuna might be combat cure-alls, it's entirely possible that they don't extend to more serious types of injuries or things like Krile's issues.
On one hand, a lot of the disjointed plot feels like what you'd get if you literally adapted a D&D campaign into a video game.
On the other hand, D&D isn't very popular in Japan. I hear the most popular TRPG over there is Call of Cthulhu, but that's obviously the wrong genre. Sword World is more plausible.
TBF, D&D is not unpopular in Japan, it's just not the One True RPG the way it often is for Western players. (Also, I'm actually not entirely sure if CoC is the most popular TTRPG there or merely the most popular Western TTRPG.)
From FFI we do know that the devs are familiar with D&D on account of shamelessly stealing a bunch of monsters from there, to the point that the official translation had to rename (and, IIRC, tweak the sprites?) some of them to avoid copyright issues.
Sword World inspiration is not implausible, though, since the whole "you have several classes you level up separately to combine their abilities" is straight from there (though it became more or less standard tech in Japanese TTRPGs).
Being fair in the case of the FFIV sequel, it wasn't a directly released sequel, it actually came out in 2008 - sometime after Final Fantasy Twelve, by which point the series was already well into its decline/hitting its peak before it's eventual decline/still going strong
I hadn't heard of it until reading this thread, and from what all the talk of it being basically identical to FF4, I kinda assumed it was a quick-and-dirty SNES game using the same engine and not a Wii game made seventeen years later for some reason.
TBF, D&D is not unpopular in Japan, it's just not the One True RPG the way it often is for Western players. (Also, I'm actually not entirely sure if CoC is the most popular TTRPG there or merely the most popular Western TTRPG.)
I've read multiple sources claiming that CoC is the most popular RPG in Japan, in lists that do include native Japanese games. I'd feel more confident if some of those sources were Japanese, but if they were I wouldn't be able to read them.
D&D had a major cultural impact on Japanese games because Japanese game devs were dorks and D&D was the one that made it big enough early enough to be international when FF1 was in development. I think it got brought up earlier already but the short version is D&D inspired the Wizardry video game series and you can draw a more direct line between that and Final Fantasy.
D&D had a major cultural impact on Japanese games because Japanese game devs were dorks and D&D was the one that made it big enough early enough to be international when FF1 was in development. I think it got brought up earlier already but the short version is D&D inspired the Wizardry video game series and you can draw a more direct line between that and Final Fantasy.
TBF, we're talking about the possibility of devs playing D&D itself rather than games inspired by it.
If we're tracing cultural impact, then yeah, sure, basically every RPG in existence owes a pound of flesh to D&D. Either directly or as an evolution of an evolution of a variation of imitation of D&D.
To clarify, it was absolutely a bug in FF1; part of the first continent extended a few spaces into a tile occupied by a high-level continent. But it was a bug people liked, so it was remade intentionally in future FF games, partly because it was useful and partly as a reference to the original Peninsula of Power.
D&D had a major cultural impact on Japanese games because Japanese game devs were dorks and D&D was the one that made it big enough early enough to be international when FF1 was in development. I think it got brought up earlier already but the short version is D&D inspired the Wizardry video game series and you can draw a more direct line between that and Final Fantasy.
In the West, D&D is to fantasy gaming as Dragon Ball is to shonen battle manga. It didn't invent most of the tropes within its pages, but it popularized them, serving as a "most recent common ancestor" to the genre.
As I understand it, D&D is to Japanese fantasy gaming as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan are to shonen battle manga. You can see the impact if you know what to look for, but its influence was mediated by other sources (mostly Wizardry). That's why anime orcs are pigs and anime kobolds are dogs, by the way. AD&D made them a big piggish/doggish, Wizardry made those traits more prominent, and now that's just what orcs and kobolds are as far as many Japanese fantasy writers are concerned, just like kobolds are little dragon-men to people who grew up with 3.5.
I hadn't heard of it until reading this thread, and from what all the talk of it being basically identical to FF4, I kinda assumed it was a quick-and-dirty SNES game using the same engine and not a Wii game made seventeen years later for some reason.
And by "Mobile", we mean "phones common in 2008". Think flip phones, not smartphones.
Hence the "episodically". There were very strong limits to how big individual files/games could be on those things compared to the kind of phones that became common just a couple years later.
edit: It being made 17 years after the original is part of its plot - its why The After Years itself takes place seventeen years after the original, a way of having just as much time pass for the characters in-universe as for the fans IRL (not that they did anything with that timeskip).
Rydia is an undersocialized teenager who literally forgot how to do white magic during training; her strongest powers are "I'm calling my dad" and "I'm calling my dad's god," but ultimately out of all these characters she is the closest we have to a 'platonic' mage who only casts spells and calls on summon. She is also the only mage in this list capable of casting Meteor, though it takes her until a very high level to learn it; from this we can conclude that Rydia is Potential Girl, and people on the Internet in powerscaling arguments will forever say that "man when Rydia reaches her full power she will be the strongest of all!!!" even though she never does reach full power. I hear she's been cast for a role in Jujutsu Kaisen.
Excuse you, I'm not about to let this slide for the sake of some good old-fashioned Lobotomy Kaisen agendaposting. What was the literal first thing Rydia did post-timeskip?
Oh right she showed up to a fight Cecil was doomed to lose, obliterated an entire Summon, then uploaded malware to Golbez's bones that made his marrow explode so he had to crawl away from the fight as a severed hand. Call her Potential Girl again and she has the Potential to glass your fucking zipcode.
Excuse you, I'm not about to let this slide for the sake of some good old-fashioned Lobotomy Kaisen agendaposting. What was the literal first thing Rydia did post-timeskip?
Oh right she showed up to a fight Cecil was doomed to lose, obliterated an entire Summon, then uploaded malware to Golbez's bones that made his marrow explode so he had to crawl away from the fight as a severed hand. Call her Potential Girl again and she has the Potential to glass your fucking zipcode.
And by "Mobile", we mean "phones common in 2008". Think flip phones, not smartphones.
Hence the "episodically". There were very strong limits to how big individual files/games could be on those things compared to the kind of phones that became common just a couple years later.
Okay, I guess Squenix wanted to get into the embryonic mobile game market. But why did they pick FF4 to follow up on? Was it just the only old Final Fantasy game they could find a dangling plot thread for? (And by "dangling plot thread," I mean the villain saying he couldn't be permanently killed while being killed.)
Okay, I guess Squenix wanted to get into the embryonic mobile game market. But why did they pick FF4 to follow up on? Was it just the only old Final Fantasy game they could find a dangling plot thread for? (And by "dangling plot thread," I mean the villain saying he couldn't be permanently killed while being killed.)
Well FF 1-3 don't have much plot to follow up on, 5 already had an anime "sequel" (although calling it a sequel is a huge stretch honestly), and Square hates 6 obviously (more seriously, the ending has the whole "magic no longer exists" thing which would make a sequel pretty difficult).
Let's be honest, considering the entire extended Final Fantasy VII universe, the series clearly doesn't particularly care about whether or not a plot thread was actually dangling or resolved in the original work when it makes direct sequels.
That would prevent reusing assets for everything but the final installment and protagonist sprites, though, and thus would have been more effort than actually went into The After Years.
