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

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Omicron said:
Now do I really want to reload back in Dali to collect 99 Wrists... Probably not.
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That would cost you 12.870 Gil to do, BTW.
Then you need to budget the Steepled Hats (260 Gil each) and the cost to make the Cotton Robe. You do come up ahead, but this whole thing works better with some sed money. Incidentally the swordfight minigame gives you exactly 10.000 gil if you complete it perfectly....
 
Omicron said:
Oh my god.

No, I think that's a disingenuous reading of the text, because Garnet tells us why she escaped her mother: Because she doesn't believe she can get through to her, but she believes that Cid might, because they clearly are or used to be old friends and he is a fellow ruler. "Escaping her mother" was never her long-term goal! She loves her mother, she just thinks she's going through a bad phase and needs to be helped.

So her initial goal was "go meet Cid, then come back with him to talk to her mom." But then, Cid decided to send the air fleet to Burmecia. That means he's probably going to stay put for now, not visit Alexandria, since he has to oversee a military action on his frontier. So Dagger is going to have to just stay put while other people address the Burmecia attack, and by the time this unfolds, war might have broken out, and it'll be too late for her to do anything. But as we saw, nobody was willing to let her make her case and listen to her, so she had to take action on her own initiative.

I think under that perspective it makes a certain kind of sense for Dagger to decide to head out on her own against everyone's advice. It's reckless, yes, but, well; she's sixteen.
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OK, but have you considered that she's abandoned me, specifically, because Garnet is a real person and I'm literally Zidane?

Not so reasonable now, is it?

Omicron said:
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On the day of the Hunt, no less.

You know, in case you don't love your kids that much.

Omicron said:
I genuinely had to pause writing this update and ask my mother if the Bull Incident actually happened or if it was some sort of fabricated memories, just because it seemed so surreal. But no, she remembered it, it really did happen.

In some ways playing this game is revisiting a part of my memory that's mostly lost in the fog!
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Be level with us, Omicron: who's your Sephiroth?

Omicron said:
At this point, Zidane not having suppressed plot-relevant memories would be the exception to the rule.
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He's 16.

Which means he's just the right age to be the veteran of the oft-mentioned war, of course.
 
Omicron said:
Then we get a shot of Freya, standing on the rooftops, and doing huge jumps between them - she can clearly just move across Linbdlum's roofs just by jumping which, if we missed previous hints, tells us that she will be our Lancer/Dragoon/Dragon Knight in this game. Seeing as that's my favorite class, I'm very excited. She wonders, "Sir Fratley, where are you? I need you…" So I'm guessing Sir Fratley is the boyfriend she's been looking for.
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Omicron said:
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Incidentally, now that we've had a bit of time to see Freya's character and got to play with her in the party, let's take a look at her character splash page-



Ominous.

Omicron said:
I am dying. Zidane you legend. This is the worst fumble in all of history, I love him. He really managed to get all the way to the finish line and then face-planted a few inches short. This man got control of the ball and turned around to kick it into his own goal.

Legendary.
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One thing that this LP has highlighted that's interesting to me is how all three of the PS1 games have gone out of their way to undermine their main character's aspirations of traditional masculinity.

FF7 says here's Cloud, the cool mercenary who doesn't give a fuck. He's gonna end up in a dress and then reveal that his super-soldier backstory was actually trauma and he was really just a grunt and now he says "let's mosey.".

FF8 says here's Squall, the aloof scarred battle-school gunblader. He's immensely insecure and constantly fights arguments in his own head and wears a ring with his fursona and gets increasingly razzed by his teammates and his whole character arc is about dropping his shields and letting people in.

And now FF9 is saying here's Zidane, the rad swashbuckling thief. He's also a consummate ladies' man...in his own mind. Actually he's just kind of an enthusiastic theater dork whose pick-up game is completely unpolished like the teenager he is.

The men of FF5 and FF6 had the occasional brush with some subversions like these, but they were mostly played straight as somewhat-comedic shonen protagonists (or in Galuf's case, the humorous old-man mentor). Before them, Cecil from FF4 was a very traditional knightly character struggling with the realities of good and evil as they related to loyalty to nation, family and friends. He was a leading man played extremely straight who looked on shenanigans like those of Palom and Porom or the occasional in-game joke with his sprite's little visor-dropping facial reaction as if to say "...really."

It's funny to watch the series learning to lean in with the rugyanks, refusing to allow its leading men to fully embrace the mantle of "cool guy" and keeping them grounded with the occasional honk from the clown horn.
 
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Kuja said:
FF7 says here's Cloud, the cool mercenary who doesn't give a fuck. He's gonna end up in a dress and then reveal that his super-soldier backstory was actually trauma and he was really just a grunt and now he says "let's mosey.".
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It's a shame that he's often remembered as a sad swordsman with people bringing up his made-up SOLDIER status as some kind of assassination job on the character rather than an integral part of his story.

I suppose it's a general danger with those kinds of characters, shonen rivals and the like. Mature writers generally do write aloof badasses as in some way unhealthy, with their arcs leading to either self-actualization through embracing vulnerability or self-destruction. But the fandom often falls in love with the surface elements, with the cool mask presented at first and ignore how it cracks.

(Well, in the case of rivals fans often project all the cool traits onto the protagonist while decrying the rival for those same traits while removing any redeeming qualities, but either way.)
 
Flare said:
That would cost you 12.870 Gil to do, BTW.
Then you need to budget the Steepled Hats (260 Gil each) and the cost to make the Cotton Robe. You do come up ahead, but this whole thing works better with some sed money. Incidentally the swordfight minigame gives you exactly 10.000 gil if you complete it perfectly....
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Honestly, unless one is doing one of the challenge runs, and therefore avoiding encounters (either to save time, to keep levels low, or both), it's not really necessary to go to the length of selling one hundred Cotton Robes; just having a few (say, a dozen or so) to sell for making some quick cash in the early game is enough, there's no need to go trough the effort required to create a full hundred.

That's best left to be done later in the game, when you have a means of transportation that lets you go from Dali to a town with a synthesis shop quickly, and the full profit from selling one hundred robes once is enough to keep you covered until the point that enemies starts dropping thousands of gil apiece, at which point grinding is a faster path to money.

It is absolutely indispensable for the challenge runs, of course, they'd be impossible if the Cotton Robe trick wasn't there, but otherwise it's in the "nice to have, but not really worth the hassle" category.
 
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Egleris said:
Didn't Yang also have a brief bout of amnesia when he was fighting the party in FFIV? Or am I misremembering that?
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You never get in a fight against Yang, but yeah he does have a brief amnesia bit after he does his Big Heroic Sacrifice against the cannon and winds up in the fairy realm somehow, which you then cure by... hitting him in the face with his wife's frying pan.

Heck, FFIII also had a dude with amnesia! Desch briefly follows the party around on the floating continent and iirc doesn't remember his past right up until around the end of his explorations with you, where he promptly jumps in a furnace for the next 20 hours only to reveal he was totally fine the entire time.
 
Egleris said:
Didn't Yang also have a brief bout of amnesia when he was fighting the party in FFIV? Or am I misremembering that?
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McFluffles said:
You never get in a fight against Yang, but yeah he does have a brief amnesia bit after he does his Big Heroic Sacrifice against the cannon and winds up in the fairy realm somehow, which you then cure by... hitting him in the face with his wife's frying pan.
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Yang actually has two bouts of amnesia, one following the attack on the sailing ship by Leviathan during which he washes up in Baron and joins the Baron army, which you fix when you arrive with Cecil having become a paladin and beat the tar out of him, the second following his attack on the cannon where he's recovered by the sylphs and is cured by the bonk from his wife's frying pan.
 
Omicron said:
This poor man cannot catch a break, Alexandria's armories don't even give him the good stuff.
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Steel that hasn't been blued needs to be actively maintained to avoid rust. Either Steiner was given heavily rusted armor, or he isn't cleaning and oiling it properly. The game wants to paint him as inept, so we're expected to believe the latter — but the Pluto Knights are also not even slightly respected, so it's plausible that he's maintaining his armor as best he can, but was given some that was already rusted, and he wasn't able to polish it back to good condition.

Omicron said:
The Dragon's Gate is below the Mist and so permanently closed, but we can use the Hunter's Gate to go out onto the plateau around Lindblum.
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So the Mist has risen. Not so long ago that they've bricked up the gate?

Omicron said:
Burmecian Soldier: "Our kingdom is being attacked by some unknown force! We are severely outmatched! Please send reinforcements immediately!"
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Right after a joyful / silly interlude. Sucker punch that gets me every time.

Omicron said:
Mostly the Festival was useful as a mechanical introduction to Freya, paired to what more we saw of her character in this update. She's sort of… Steiner if he took a chill pill?
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She's the fusion form of Steiner and Zidane, plus about five years of experience in serious situations. Cool, agile, able to give a beat-down... and respected, at least by Zidane so far. Not that Steiner wants Zidane's respect specifically, but he wants respect in general.
 
Kuja said:
Yang actually has two bouts of amnesia, one following the attack on the sailing ship by Leviathan during which he washes up in Baron and joins the Baron army, which you fix when you arrive with Cecil having become a paladin and beat the tar out of him, the second following his attack on the cannon where he's recovered by the sylphs and is cured by the bonk from his wife's frying pan.
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Oh whoops, somehow I totally forgot that one. Probably because it lasts all of 30 seconds of screentime, while the other one at least requires a brief sidequest.

Anyways the point is Final Fantasy really does like those amnesia subplots.
 
Kuja said:
Incidentally, now that we've had a bit of time to see Freya's character and got to play with her in the party, let's take a look at her character splash page-



Ominous.
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Somewhere, ten updates in the future, Freya's missing boyfriend reappears. He is a goldfish-man.
Freya: Sir Fratley! I've been searching for you! What awful trials have kept you from my side these past three years? Whatever they are, you're not fighting alone anymore. My friends and I can help you defeat them!
Fratley: Oh, hey, Miss Rat. How do you know my name? Have we met before?
Freya: NOOOOOO!!!!
 
Omicron said:
I'm trying to think of which was "my" Disney movie, and I'm realizing that I was kinda late to it, because while I was a child during the Disney Renaissance, the movies that have marked me are actually the less successful ones of the late Renaissance and the closing of the traditional animation age: Namely Hercules, Atlantis, and The Treasure Planet.
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I know how it is to love a less successful Disney movie, as a kid I loved the Great Mouse Detective. Which I still say is one of their better pieces. Vincent Price makes an amazing cartoon villain.

Zap Rowsdower said:
Also Dissidia in a completely separate take on the topic
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Probably not actually spoilers because I don't think Omi's doing these games:
I haven't played any Kingdom Hearts, but isn't lost memory a big thing there, too? Does that count as FInal Fantasy?
 
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SolipsistSerpent said:
I know how it is to love a less successful Disney movie, as a kid I loved the Great Mouse Detective. Which I still say is one of their better pieces. Vincent Price makes an amazing cartoon villain.
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While I use terms like 'Disney Renaissance' for ease of communication, I admit I'm usually skeptical of terms like Golden Age, Dark Age, or Renaissance. Part of that's due to the original Dark Ages and Renaissance, but it's also because of Disney.

Seeing Great Mouse Detective (Robin Hood and Fox and the Hound too) be labelled Dark Age films, since they're post-Walt and pre-Little Mermaid, just feels wrong. As does Pocahontas being called a Renaissance movie.

That said, calling them Disney's Dark Age and Renaissance does make more sense from a financial and cultural perspective.

Incidentally, I've seen the post-Renaissance era @Omicron mentioned be named the 'Lost Era' by the reviewer Unshaved Mouse. He thought 'Second Dark Age' was too harsh for the era that gave us Emperor's New Groove and Lilo and Stitch, and that Lost Era reflected how experimental and all over the place the era was.

SolipsistSerpent said:
I haven't played any Kingdom Hearts, but isn't lost memory a big thing there, too? Does that count as FInal Fantasy?
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Yep, sure is. They had a whole game with it in the title for starters (Chain of Memories)
 
SolipsistSerpent said:
Doublechecking, Omi's not doing those games, right? They aren't mainline Final Fantasy, even if they're arguably Final Fantasy.
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Probably not. The Kingdom Hearts series would be too much of an undertaking on top of already LPing mainline Final Fantasy
 
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So I keep checking a French playthrough now and then to see if there are interesting changes, and I gotta say, I wasn't really expecting "playable party member gets an entire different gender" to be one of the version differences
 
If he is, it's just getting ready to flip before the flip infects mainline final fantasy. Since final fantasy adopted the kingdom hearts flip combat system, unfortunately.

Yes I'm still traumatized by final fantasy type 0.
 
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SolipsistSerpent said:
Hah, I bet I remember who you're talking about.
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It's not a hard guess to make, I imagine.

Omicron said:
I wasn't really expecting "playable party member gets an entire different gender" to be one of the version differences
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If it's the party member I think, that one was a woman in the Italian version, and either male or gender neutral in English, if I remember correctly; and I believe gender neutral in Japanese. What is the French's choice?
 
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