Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"..."
(What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in SeeDs, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Galbadia, and I have over 300 confirmed junctions. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top summoner in the entire Balamb armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Planet, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the radio tower? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across Timber and your train is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the SeeD Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, chicken-wuss.)
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What's extra funny is that Squall probably does have over 300 confirmed kills by now. His salary depends on it.
Also, here's a thought: does the fight against NORG count towards the number of fights you must win to not lose a rank?
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
IIRC boss battle count, yes. OTOH you have to win them to progress and can't run from them, so it would be weird if the game penalized you for winning them.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Version of the fight wherein NORG realizes at the last second that if Squall kills him he's mandated to bump up another rank and immediately smashes a "World's Best Garden Master" mug over Squall's head in a bureaucratic rage killing him instantly.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Earnestly this update has been a delight because when I was younger NORG was rather meaningless to me but rereading this as a dude in his middle age I think this guy is hilarious.
He's a fat dude (+1) secretly a monster among humans (+1) hanging out in his hidden underground lair (+1) pulling the strings clandestinely (+1) and ultimately fights you from his comfy chair-pod (+1). And as a bonus he works in real estate. (+1)
He's basically the FF8 version of the Shadow Broker.
biggest he just like me fr fr energy in the entire series BUJURURURURURU
He's a fat dude (+1) secretly a monster among humans (+1) hanging out in his hidden underground lair (+1) pulling the strings clandestinely (+1) and ultimately fights you from his comfy chair-pod (+1). And as a bonus he works in real estate. (+1)
He's basically the FF8 version of the Shadow Broker.
biggest he just like me fr fr energy in the entire series BUJURURURURURU
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, now. There's no indication he ever worked in real estate. He put up seed (heh) money for a mercenary school, and makes most of his cash hiring out killers to whoever offers enough.
He's a bad enough guy without you baselessly slandering him. (/jk etc. unless the real estate in question is him being a landlord)
He's a bad enough guy without you baselessly slandering him. (/jk etc. unless the real estate in question is him being a landlord)
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Presumably NORG owns not just the Garden facilities as a matter of condominium, but also the land they're each respectively on. BGU probably owns significant real property in Balamb as well.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
NORG's estate will contest ownership of the crater where it used to be until the end of time.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wait a fucking minute.
Evil villain overlord who prefers to act through minions?
A weird, non-human being whose origins are left unexplained?
Sits in a sci-fi pod?
Possesses awesome magical power, but is only after base profit?
Works in real estate?
...
Evil villain overlord who prefers to act through minions?
A weird, non-human being whose origins are left unexplained?
Sits in a sci-fi pod?
Possesses awesome magical power, but is only after base profit?
Works in real estate?
...
Fortunately, NORG thought ahead - legally, anywhere a Garden is located is his land, so now his value is rapidly going up as Balamb accidentally librates the entire ocean for his estate.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
SeaSirocco
Formerly 'Sanae Aran' / Aspiring Artist
- Location
- The Seaside
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I wonder what Balamb Garden looked like before Cid remodelled it?
Seeing as the 'halo' structure seems to be an integral part of the mobile mode, it can't have been too different overall. Maybe he just took the halo's aesthetic and spread it to the rest of the building?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Alternatively, NORG's just happy it's now oceanfront.
FRIEZA FRIEZA FRIEZA FRIEEEEZAAAA!
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't think this is strictly true. The Mario and Megaman games come to mind as examples where the NES entries are given at least as much reverence as the SNES ones. Has any Mario level received as much love as World 1-1?
Of course, platformers existed for a while before Super Mario Bros (obvious examples include the pre-super Mario Brother games), and shmups were even older and more ubiquitous than that.
Not to say that SMB and Rockman weren't adding new elements to those established formulae, of course, but they were adding those elements to an established formula. Genres which originated in the third console generation (like JRPGs and the action-adventure mush that Zelda games fit into) are obviously going to take a while to figure out what works and what doesn't; combine that with the SNES's improved processing power and color palettes, and it's no wonder that the SNES titles tend to be remembered better. Combine that iterative improvement with freedom from (some of) the NES's limitations, and you get a significant leap in quality.
Final Fantasy IV
It's remarkable that Final Fantasy managed to go so long without a (mainline) game that failed to significantly improve on its predecessor. Granted, a lot of that is because Final Fantasy can't take two steps forward without taking one step back, but it keeps taking multiple steps forward.FF4's big steps forward are in characterization. FF3 gave its characters some flavor, without doing much to define them or integrate them into the story; they're pixie stix. FF2 integrated its characters into the story, but they were bland as white bread. FF1 was not given the tools to try doing either; they're sawdust.
FF4 finally combined the things FF3 did well and the things FF2 did well to give us actual characters, with character arcs, sometimes. Not the fillet mignon that we'd see in some later Final Fantasy games, but Cecil is probably equivalent to a burger, and most of the party members at least rise to the level of good french fries.
(Edge is a McDonald's french fry. One that fell out of the fry basket and spent twenty minutes in the fryer and someone decided to throw it in with your meal for some reason. Better than sawdust, I guess.)
I should probably make lunch.
Anyways, the characters aren't the only thing FF4 improved.
- The plot is hardly perfect, but it's another incremental step above what came before.
- The narrative has discernible themes, albeit ones that are clunkily handled in places. (I wouldn't be surprised if the writers wrote the plot, then tweaked some scenes to make the strongest themes more present, without consistently adjusting other parts of the story to fit those tweaks.)
- ATB is at best a mixed bag, but otherwise battles are the best they've been. IV doesn't have the poorly-designed progression of FF2 or the nonexistent boss fights of FF3 or the jank saturation of FF1.
- Obviously, being a SNES game rather than NES means it's prettier. Look at all the colors! And background layers!
But there's still plenty of room for FF5 to improve. Character interactions aren't bad, but they're stifled by either a lack of development or abuse of mind control plot twists. The villains have a bit more potential than in prior installments, but that potential is still squandered by their actual presence in the story (and, in some cases, mind control). There are way too many heroic sacrifices (or "heroic" sacrifices) that turn into heroic "sacrifices" (or "heroic" "sacrifices") when the character shows up fine an hour later.
Ugh. I hate ATB. It still has the things I've heard people who don't like turn-based games say they don't like about turn-based games (like the lack of "skill" required [please imagine that I said "skill" in a derisive tone], but it also incorporates things I dislike about action games ("AAAH GOTTA DO SOMETHING HIT BUTTONS CRAP WRONG BUTTON," or as Omicron calls it, "time pressure").
ATB isn't bad enough to make me drop games if the other stuff is good enough (I love Chrono Trigger), and it's sometimes used for cool stuff. I still hate it.
Unfortunately, most of the cool stuff would break if you did that. I'm thinking bosses where you have to time attacks (e.g. "Attack when its tail is up") or party moves which require waiting for multiple party members to have full ATB gauges (I'm surprised double techs aren't a more common JRPG feature).
This is one of the things, I think, that FF1-3 were missing. FF1's only storytelling tools were text crawls and NPCs with one dialogue box each. FF2/3 added simple cutscenes (and the occasional "story battle"), but they were limited by both technology and art budget.The two terrifying knights who just admitted to killing her mother close in on the little girl, demanding that she come with them, pushing her back, until all this results in the most devastating battle screen in all Final Fantasy so far:
Christ.
What an absolute gut-punch.
FF4's cutscenes are a bit more refined (mostly because the art budget was stretched for some more acting poses), but story battles are a whole new tool in the toolbox. And it can accomplish things no cutscene ever could, because it puts the player in control. They can feel things that previous Final Fantasy games would need to make someone say. (It's not as much that as Rydia joining the party a dozen levels behind Cecil, but it's more concentrated.)
Good thing the game is turn-based, so you get a chance to stop and think about how you need to adjust your strategy...
I know people make fun of hand-holdy tutorials, but I'll take a lifetime of those if it means I never stumble through a game without understanding its basic mechanics again.
There's also a notable exception in VII (albeit in a more antiheroic party member), but I'm not surprised that it's primarily an antagonist feature.
For the first three games, the enemy graphics lived on the background layer, which gave them limited mobility but let them be big and complicated and stuff. Bosses especially could be BIG, since they didn't need to leave room for up to eight additional monsters in a random encounter. (With obvious exceptions for bosses that came back as a random encounters, bosses who are palette swaps of random encounters, and bosses that are literally just a harder random encounter.)
But player characters are sprites, which limited their size, and their small size defines size expectations for ordinary human characters. So humans are only ~24 pixels tall. But that's awfully small for a boss, so ordinary human antagonists with boss battles more or less need to have big boss graphics, which means they're bigger in the boss fight than they normally are. In the NES era, this is as much a technical constraint as it is a creative choice. They can't have enemies that both look like "normal humans" (the PCs) and are legible/cool, so enemies which started as regular humans need a bigger combat form, even if that's just their normal character design at 250% scale. But if they're transforming that way, why not have them transform in a more dramatic way?
FF4 is sticking to 8-bit FF's presentation about as hard as it can, down to its player sprites being the same size and its enemy sprites being about as big and static as their NES counterparts. Because it has the same limitations (albeit from creative choices rather than technical constraints), it has the same incentives. And after four games, I guess they figured it was tradition?
But player characters are sprites, which limited their size, and their small size defines size expectations for ordinary human characters. So humans are only ~24 pixels tall. But that's awfully small for a boss, so ordinary human antagonists with boss battles more or less need to have big boss graphics, which means they're bigger in the boss fight than they normally are. In the NES era, this is as much a technical constraint as it is a creative choice. They can't have enemies that both look like "normal humans" (the PCs) and are legible/cool, so enemies which started as regular humans need a bigger combat form, even if that's just their normal character design at 250% scale. But if they're transforming that way, why not have them transform in a more dramatic way?
FF4 is sticking to 8-bit FF's presentation about as hard as it can, down to its player sprites being the same size and its enemy sprites being about as big and static as their NES counterparts. Because it has the same limitations (albeit from creative choices rather than technical constraints), it has the same incentives. And after four games, I guess they figured it was tradition?
I also think it's wild and want to discuss it.
Why was Rydia six to begin with? Or eight, or ten, or whatever age she was.
Leviathan the summon dragging Rydia the summoner to the Land of Summons and her coming back as a stronger, more confident mage is an okay plot point. Not great, needed more foreshadowing, but it's fine. It's an offscreen training arc. Sure, why not.
But then they added the unforeshadowed, unexplained point that the Land of Summoners somehow aged her several years in a matter of days (weeks?). And that's the kind of superfluous yet game-changing detail that makes me wonder whether this whole cul-de-sac was intended as an excuse to make this happen.
Edge has a crush on Rydia, which...definitely doesn't improve my opinion of this plot point. Did they age Rydia up so that an adult man could think she's hot without it being completely creepy? But then why have her start as a little kid? It's not like anything she did in the plot was especially childish, at least not in a way that couldn't be changed to teenaged impetuousness with some quick dialogue edits.
(Thank goodness Edge didn't know child!Rydia, or I'd be getting Usagi Drop vibes. Never accept even a drop of usagi.)
Leviathan the summon dragging Rydia the summoner to the Land of Summons and her coming back as a stronger, more confident mage is an okay plot point. Not great, needed more foreshadowing, but it's fine. It's an offscreen training arc. Sure, why not.
But then they added the unforeshadowed, unexplained point that the Land of Summoners somehow aged her several years in a matter of days (weeks?). And that's the kind of superfluous yet game-changing detail that makes me wonder whether this whole cul-de-sac was intended as an excuse to make this happen.
Edge has a crush on Rydia, which...definitely doesn't improve my opinion of this plot point. Did they age Rydia up so that an adult man could think she's hot without it being completely creepy? But then why have her start as a little kid? It's not like anything she did in the plot was especially childish, at least not in a way that couldn't be changed to teenaged impetuousness with some quick dialogue edits.
(Thank goodness Edge didn't know child!Rydia, or I'd be getting Usagi Drop vibes. Never accept even a drop of usagi.)
In principle, I like the idea that Rydia is physically 16 but still has a childish mentality due to spending half of her life being raised by inhuman summons who don't understand human emotions or morality. (Or alternatively, who are hardcore Kantians.)
Rydia. Rydia please. That's not- Am I suppose to still treat her as a child? Did she get some particularly Kantian philosophy classes in the Land of Summons?
Yeah, that's it, that's my take. The summons are hardcore Kantians. Morality does not change according to circumstances. If you lie to protect someone's life, Leviathan is disappointed in your weak moral fiber. That's canon now.
In practice, having Rydia act childishly just makes (26 according to the wiki) Edge's crush on the (magically teenaged) tagalong kid more uncomfortable.
Right after Zeromus said "I am evil btw," he claimed he was "the...hatred of Zemus..." and that he loathes everything.
There's a version of this story where Zeromus was replaced with some kind of avatar of hate—human hatred, Lunarian hatred, summon-spirit hatred, swan hatred, etc. In this case, Zeromus saying he'll live on as long as people hate each other would make perfect sense. And it would probably be possible to tie that in with other times hatred came up earlier in the plot.
Sadly, we didn't get that version.
Who would know more about the Kingdom of Baron's plans?
(Not the literal child. I mean, she's experienced some of those plans, but only some.)
I bet Porom enjoyed this fight.
"...worth it..."
Not worse than denying Baron's soldiers the crystal that they've destroyed multiple cities to collect.
She just needs a haircut. Her bangs are covering everything except her eyes. Somehow.The dwarves mostly share this sprite above with the horned helmet and the Black Mage-style obscured faces with yellow eyes - which is to say it's using a slightly altered version of the Viking sprite from FF3 NES. Now, ostensibly, this is just because the dwarves' helms obscure their faces, and isn't meant to carry any greater implications… at least until the game decides that it wants to have a dwarf child involved in the plot in a minor capacity, but for some reason the game decides to double down on the dwarves' faces being completely obscured no matter what, resulting in this hilarious sprite:
I don't experience any kind of sinister chill hearing this, nor any traumlatic memories whatsoever.
THE NO-FACE CHILD. I CAN SEE HER IN MY NIGHTMARES.
Except magnetic fields, of course. If only the dwarves had some of those.
Edge: Go on, gals. Shoo.
Rosa: Without my white magic, you'll die before you even see Zemus!
Rydia: And without my summons, you wouldn't stand a chance against him.
Edge: We're the three strongest warriors this planet's ever seen.
Rydia: When was the last time you beat a monster without Mega Flare:
Edge: ...
Cecil: ...
Kain: C'mon, we need to Mega Flare some moon dinosaur zombies.
That's ridiculous. Brothers who only meet as adults don't fight anywhere near as hard as ones who were raised together.
Maybe Zemus was an only child and assumed siblings would get along.
I like that both of us made jokes with basically the same premise that came to polar opposite conclusions.
Oh, so that's why Final Fantasy gp is called gil? (And why the stuff called GP is something else.)
They got stuck in Oozaru form once they landed and can't fit in their space pods. Tragic.
...Salted with crack that makes him somehow better than all the other French Fries? Well, I guess we're all entitled to our own opinions on how awesome Edge is
Jokes aside, it's still wild to me how much of a 180 my opinion of Edge made with this LP, from vaguely remember "oh yeah cool ninja dude" to "wait this guy does basically nothing for the party after his conflict is instantly resolved and spends most of his screentime crushing on a teenager half his age".
There's a sweet spot somewhere on the tutorial line between "twelve hours of mandatory forced tutorials" and "eat shit figure out everything yourself loser", at least. Personally, I like it best when it's things like later FF games having the optional side rooms in the earlygame that are just "here's a dozen scholars or something that will tell you all the little tidbits you need to know to play the game", or Dark Souls with its tutorial messages that give just enough info to learn the game for a first-timer but can all be ignored and run past on subsequent playthroughs. Certainly beats out things like Pokemon games still going "hello, would you like a forced guide on how to catch Pokemon with no option to skip if you've been playing this series for 30 years?"
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Games of that era had less in the way of basic tutorials quite often because they came bundled with 20 to 40 page instruction manuals detailing the names and art of non-spoiler characters, what commands you are likely to encounter in the first third of the game do, worldbuilding details (edit: the Playstation version of FFIV's manual had a page detailing what the major countries were and what they were each known for, for instance), controls, bios of major non-spoiler enemies, and sometimes even art and bios of common enemies - how do you think we know those chestnuts in Mario are called Goombas when Super Mario Bros had basically no text?
Then they make remakes that are as "assume you already know all this from reading the manual" as the original but without a manual included, giving a fake impression of older games being less handholdy and having fake "figure it out" difficulty. No, they were just as handholding, it was just analog handholding instead of part of the game itself.
It was only around the seventh console generation or so, give or take a generation, that manuals started to go by the wayside and games started to compensate with ingame help menus and popup tool tips and the like. With earlier exceptions of course, like Mario RPG stopping to explain timed hits because it's easier to show timing than to read about it.
Then they make remakes that are as "assume you already know all this from reading the manual" as the original but without a manual included, giving a fake impression of older games being less handholdy and having fake "figure it out" difficulty. No, they were just as handholding, it was just analog handholding instead of part of the game itself.
It was only around the seventh console generation or so, give or take a generation, that manuals started to go by the wayside and games started to compensate with ingame help menus and popup tool tips and the like. With earlier exceptions of course, like Mario RPG stopping to explain timed hits because it's easier to show timing than to read about it.
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A book is not "you physically cannot press any button other than the one the tutorial wants you to, no, it doesn't matter that the music is too loud, you aren't allowed to touch that until you get through thirty minutes of 'you must press X button'".
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
1. "McDonald's french fry" was not the end of the description....Salted with crack that makes him somehow better than all the other French Fries? Well, I guess we're all entitled to our own opinions on how awesome Edge is
2. I also used to think McDonalds was the pinnacle of fast food. Then my family got unpoor enough to eat out at other restaurants. McDonalds is consistent and has no other virtues.
No argument there, but I think it's better to err on the side of overexplaining.
This is true in some genres. But there were exceptions within those genres, genres which were far less polite than this, and companies working in those genres who were infamous for being even less polite than usual. (Sierra. At least they got less brutal over time.)
Most games these days let you open the options menu before you start playing, and let you open the menu during the tutorial. (Maybe not literally during the Must Press X Button segments, but there's usually enough time between them to pause and tweak the music.)
It's also worth noting that options menus that let you adjust the volume of different kinds of sound are, in decade terms, relatively recent.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The absolute gold standard here is the original Railroad Tycoon, which in addition to having an ingame tutorial railroad also had a manual with multiple chapters describing how to play the game (including one specifically about the tutorial). And it'd also throw in a history and engineering lesson on historic railroads (primarily but not exclusively in the United States) and major persons in their operation. It is 184 pages long.
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I know, just cut off the rest of the description for the joke. And you'll never see me say McDonalds in general is the pinnacle of fast food, I worked there for five years I know how that garbage is made, it mostly exists as "usually the cheapest fast food option that won't kill you".
There's just something about those fries that's addictive though, been to many a higher class restaurant (ie literally anything that isn't McDonalds) but very few can compare for me.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This post actually reminded me of something I've been overlooking:
Final Fantasy VIII has a manual.
Obviously. It's a PSX-era game.
Now, I avoided looking at the manual precisely because it contained some out-of-game information about characters. But of course, as a child, I would have had access to that manual, and its knowledge would have informed my perception of the game; so in a sense avoiding it was sort of introducing an 'artificial' blindness. Still, I waited this long; and now that we are at least halfway through the game, I feel fairly confident that it's fine to look at now.
So let's look at the FFVIII manual. What does it say?
Well, we've talked a bit in the past about how the introduction of various characters is constructed in a somewhat awkward way - such as Selphie being introduced early on but never giving her name until we meet her again - which suggests that the game originally intended to allow us to rename all party members, before changing that to 'only Squall, Rinoa and the GFs' at some point in development?
Well, the manual all but confirms that's the case. Specifically, it says: ""The Name Entering Screen shown on the right will be displayed for Squall when he comes under player control for the first time. It also appears when Squall meets new members of his party or obtains new Guardian Forces. To rename a character or Guardian Force, use the directional button to select a letter and press the X button to choose it."
Beside that, the manual is mostly occupied by the mechanics of the game - understandably given their complexity; there are long pages explaining GFs, Junctioning, and Triple Triad, as well as the Tamagotchi-style Chocobo minigame played on a separate device. All good.
What I find more interesting is that the manual includes something a little more foreign today: a list of the characters that just tells you what their deal is before you even encounter them.
Or at least what their deal is as far as the manual is concerned.
Like, I hadn't realized how much my expectations of media had changed over time, but having the paratext tell you "this character may look gruff, but he actually has a heart of gold" before you actually meet the character and get to see for yourself that they have a heart of gold used to be standard for the fiction I consumed but feels like it no longer is? Maybe that's related to the rise of 'spoiler culture,' but, hm. "There's a sniper called Irvine who looks like he has a devil may care attitude but is in reality sensitive and serious" isn't spoilers, but it's something a modern story would let you experience firsthand rather than just tell you in the booklet?
And this is compounded by the fact that said paratext is inconsistent as to whether it's telling you stuff you wouldn't know for a while ahead of time (Quistis's depressive tendencies), hiding character twists because it doesn't seem to know there's a twist (Selphie's violent tendencies), or saying stuff that is either actual spoilers for later in the game or just plain making shit up (Laguna being an actual journalist rather than that being the dream he never got to fulfill). It just feels... Old school.
Here's the character entries for all characters in the manual:
Also, I guess Laguna is a whole 27 years old, huh. And every other character is specifically, exactly 17 except for Seifer and Quistis, both 18.