The Gamer's Quarter

[Shapermc]

So as a certain someone recently brought it up FFVII is pretty bad.

So let's figure it out, can any FF stand the test of being taken seirously past the age of 17 or so?

I would like to say that the immaturity has been part of the charm for the games. FFIV Advance, for example, is ridiculious. But it still has a charm about it. FFV's main enemy is named X-Death. FFVI's main enemy dresses like a clown. It is like watching a horror movie for buckets of blood or slowing down when passing a car wreck.

The above linked review points out my main reason for no longer playing jRPGs really. They are now too long. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed M&L:Superstar Saga: even with doing all the minigames and everything else I still completed it in around 20 hours.

So yes, lets hear thoughts on Final Fantasy games.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Wolverine]

There are actually people beside me who don't like Final Fantasy VII? I got banned from some forum a few years ago for saying I felt the game was vastly overrated. And I had bought it back when it was the big thing.

I'm not an RPG fan.. though I do like the occasional RPG sort of game that has more real time combat such as the Secret of Mana games. I did get some enjoyment out of Final Fantasy VI cos I actually did like some of the characters like Locke and Edgar, and I liked Chrono Trigger to some degree, but generally I can't stand the majority of RPGs, especially any that have random enemy encounters (especilaly when yer just trying to get to a freakin' save point cos ya got a bus to catch and you can't bear to sit through that tedious half hour cut scene you just got through). I do like RPG elements that have crossed over into games not really considered 'true' RPGs such as X-Men Legends and the later Castlevania games. Part of the reason I don't like turn based RPG systems is I feel detached from the battle, like I'm just giving out orders rather than taking part in the fight myself. That probably comes from me enjoying beat 'em ups a lot, and not understanding why theres so much standing around and just letting someone smack ya with some fiery demon of death when any sane person would have at least tried getting out of the way.

Actually you know what.... I'll write more when I can type more coherently.. I'm falling asleep right now and having trouble making any sense so am just typing anything that comes into my head even remotely connected to the subject matter... been a tiring day already and it ain't over yet...

[ApM]

I've never played any Final Fantasy game for more than like 5 minutes. And nothing I've read has compelled me to try.

I'm rather enjoying Earthbound Zero on my DS right now, though!

[dhex]

final fantasy I has a lot in common with the pc rpgs of old, though it is less forgiving.

i played through it when origins came out and i was unemployado'd and had a reasonably good time. then again, zero teen angst = happy dhex.

i've been in the mood to crank up wasteland again, but then i think about how insane it is and like, shit, i'd rather finish fallout 2.
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[Mr. Apol]

I've been struck with the strange urge to play FFVIII again. Not that I ever even finished it in the first place. I used to "hate" it because all the other "final fantasy fans" did.

I got to thinking though. If most of these Final Fantasy games aren't really very good, and everyone hates Final Fantasy VIII...

maybe it's actually good?

So, I'm going to find a copy and play through it. I don't remember much about it, so it'll be a new experience all over again. I remember I liked the setting, and the way you got paid a salary.
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LJ -- Profile

[Zack]

Final Fantasy VII was designed as spectacle, not literature, so of course it's going to age poorly. That doesn't mean it was never good, though. And I would say that its charm stands up pretty well, considering. I actually used to think the goofy polygon dolls were ugly and I have warmed up to them. I certainly think FFVIII looks worse.

Anyhow, if you want a modern Final Fantasy that omits the teenage power fantasy story, all I can think of is Crystal Chronicles.

If I were to pick a problem with Japanese RPGs, it would be Hundred Percent Completion Fever -- and the accompanying dull fear that you will miss something crucial if you don't search every nook or play with a FAQ in your lap -- and not length or inanity. The length does suck, though.

EDIT: I misspelled "completion" as "complaton," thus making no sense whatsoever.

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

we all know squaresoft is a bunch of hacks, right?
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[Wolverine]

[purplechair]

[JasonMoses]

I thought you can't XP grind in FFVIII since the enemies level up with you?

[TheRumblefish]

The Final Fantasy series is the epitomy of a mixed bag. I fell in love with FFVII because it was the first game I ever owned for my Playstation. My parents didn't know that it needed a memory card, so for about a week I played that game over and over again, trying to get farther each time without dying. I have special, priceless memories with tge game. The first time I saw the world outside of Midgar city was breathtaking, and then finnally beating the game. It was magic.

I look back now, and I dont see it in the same light at all. Instead, all what I see is Advent Children and a bunch of raving lunatics dressing up as Cloud and using ginat cardboard cutout swords and using industrial strength glue in their hair. Same goes for every other Final Fantasy character. Not that I have anything against Cosplayers or anything, it's just a little harder to do then most characters.

So, in turn I frown upon the game now. It sits there, and I know that I will never ever play it again. But I won't get rid of it, because of an emotional connection with those CD's. They just mean to much to me. What of the other series? I've played all of the rest. I enjoyed FFV for it's absurdity, FFVI for it's majestic steampunk attitude, and even tried real hard to enjoy FFVIII.

It's just a piece of my past now, and I don't think I'll ever go back to it.
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[ApM]

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see someone convince me that I should play a Final Fantasy game.

Whenever people talk positively about Final Fantasy, it's always in this weird tone that suggests that, yeah, it didn't hold up well maybe, but of course I played it and loved it because everyone did. Well, I didn't. Nobody really cites a reason why they loved it beyond being a dumb kid and not knowing any better. That's bullshit. There must be something objectively good in there, somewhere. Lay it on me.

[DonMarco]

Why does Final Fantasy use roman numerals, when there is no concrete connection between the games? Not the world, the magic, the characters, nothing.

At least there was some degree of well-intentioned RPG goodness up to the end of the SNES with VI. I mean, since VII Square has been pretty unapologetic about any problems that fans had with loading times and the whole "style over substance" approach that VII started. After that, you have the fans (specifically the FF fans starting with VII). The PlayStation crowd. Not knocking you if that was your first system and game, but it's not like the option to play the previous (highly emulatable) games.
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Collector of over 1,538 strategy guides. That's weird, right?

[purplechair]

[TheRumblefish]

[friedchicken]

After cutting myself off from Final Fantasy after VII, I picked up X once it had dropped below $30, and... I just couldn't do it. I find that I no longer care for the character designs (I'd like to articulate this more, but the words aren't flowing) and that the game's systems have become outrageously baroque for me. Then, thinking back to VII, I realized that one of the reasons I played it at all when it came out is because it gave me a hell of a lot of game for my hard-saved dollars at the time. It's funny, because that's another reason why I don't like the series now-- it just demands too much time, and most of that is spent in what I consider to be poorly written, overly sentimental dialogue, and ridiculously over-developed game systems (the whole magic system-- whatever it's called-- in FFX is a prime example. Pre-VII games were long and involved, true, but the medium of the NES/SNES had a real limiting effect on what have become some of the irritating factors of the later games. Again, I got IV and VI at a time when I was renting SNES games and beating them in a few hours-- a 20 hour+ game was a real treasure!

On another note, I'm really tired of being asked if I'm going to buy Advent Children by EB/Gamestop employees-- but I can't blame them for asking, given the number of my twenty and thirty-something coworkers who are drooling about it, and the marketing juggernaut that has placed 3 to 4 commercials for it during every TV show I watch, along with Kingdom Hearts II commercials (another game I've never 'gotten' the fascination otherwise rational people have for it). I just never had the emotional investment in FFVII to care what happened to the characters after the end of the game.

[dhex]

[dessgeega]

[friedchicken]

[SuperWes]

I went to get Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on Tuesday and it was sold out at both Best Buy and at Target. Target even went so far as to put out "rain check" tickets that would guarantee you would get it for the sale price. I got one of these "rain check" tickets and discovered that their sale price was exactly the same as their regular price and was ensured that I would get 0% off of the movie using my raincheck ticket when it finally arrived on the shelves.

Say what you will about Final Fantasy, but there's a huge number of people (teens I guess) that are obsessed with it. Check out almost any 1up blog, most game based live journals, or well, pretty much anything Chris Kohler has ever written and you'll find an audience who can't see past the fact that "Final Fantasy" means nothing to Square-Enix but a bigger budget and fingers crossed for higher sales.

What's interesting is how unaware of this market all of these department stores are. I mean, I'm sure they're not limiting the number of copies of Advent Children Target or Best Buy can get, so it must mean that their buyers do not understand the tug of Square-Enix on the teenage heart.

Also, say what you will about Final Fantasy, the games are much, much better than pretty much any other jRPG series out there barring Dragon Quest, but I'd even argue against that if I felt strongly enough about it.

Hate the genre, not the game.

-Wes
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[simplicio]

I'd say there are some good parts to FF6, mostly cause it's the only one I've played that gives screen time to peripheral characters, who tend to be less involved in Huge Melodrama than the main cast. Note that I'm also not going to go back and play it again to figure out whether or not this is correct.

[friedchicken]

[Zack]

Wes, I strongly advise against buying Advent Children. Shit, my fiancee came home with a free copy and I regret even watching it. I've probably seen a worse movie, but never one that so confidently and shamelessly wasted my time. I was expecting a shallow, shiny guilty pleasure, and it's not even that.

[Wolverine]

[dessgeega]

[wourme]

I sort of missed the fuss over how good FF7 is and then, later, how bad it is because I didn't really talk with people about or read about video games much at the time that I played it. At first, I didn't like it at all because of the polygon graphics and the profanity and I quit after about an hour. But I returned to it later and ended up liking it a lot. They just packed so much into that game that I couldn't help becoming immersed in the game's world, whatever flaws that world might have.

I was amazed at how terrible that Advent Children film was, on the other hand.

It's hard to talk objectively about how the older games measure up today because I can't separate the experiences from the time that I played them, but I was completely enamored with both Final Fantasy and (especially) Final Fantasy 2 (US). I've played all of the US releases except for X-2 and 11 (neither of which I plan to try), and I thought they were all worthwhile. Okay, except for Mystic Quest. I've never played a FF game more than once, and there is plenty to complain about for many of them (especially the newer ones), but I think it's still a very good series and I'm looking forward to 12.

There are actually very few RPGs that I have the patience to play since the SNES era. In fact, I think the only non-FF ones I've finished are Chrono Cross and Skies of Arcadia. (Well, unless you count Paper Mario.) I started playing Dragon Quest 8 this week, though, and despite being quite underwhelmed with the demo, it seems to have a lot of promise.

My favorite console RPGs without question are Dragon Quest 3 and 4. If I were to play all of the RPGs I've played in the past for the first time right now, that might be different.

[dessgeega]

dragon quest III will spoil you for other jrpgs. especially if you play the gbc edition.

i am a fan of the original mother as well.

but this is a thread about final fantasy.
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[SuperWes]

[dessgeega]

the final fantasy movie isn't a game.

i'm not sure it's a movie either?
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[Zack]

[dessgeega]

[Shapermc]

[Zack]

[TheRumblefish]

[friedchicken]

[Lackey]

I think the last 20 minutes were pretty good...actually, the movie's strongest when no one is talking. Mostly because the visuals are just so eerie.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[GSL]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I enjoyed Advent Children when I watched it... at a friends house on his computer late one night months before it came out over here in the US. I'm glad I didn't pay money for it though.

I doubt I could ever watch it again, once is pretty much enough for me.

[dhex]

[SuperWes]

Advent Children was really, really bad. Incredibly bad. Like, worse than the original Final Fantasy Movie by a long shot. It's Matrix Reloaded bad. It's nearly Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon bad, and in some ways actually worse. It's much, much worse than Silent Hill was, and I can only thank god that it was released straight to DVD and had its US release date pushed back so far that people are pretty much done talking about it so I won't have to watch the internet explode in the same way it did with that movie.

That said, it's pretty much exactly what Final Fantasy VII would be if it had been made as a movie instead of a game. The story of Final Fantasy works in a game because they keep the player's mind occupied by random battles and maximizing Materia use just enough that weak endings to useless plot threads don't stick out as much as they do on film. Watching the story in movie form instead of through a game forces me to re-evalute my nostalgic opinion of how good Final Fantasy VII's story was. The movie takes FFVII's story, points out how silly it really was, and then spreads layers of terrible on top of that until it's a mess that only Square-Enix's talented CG artists could possibly have put into moving pictures without making it feel like third tier fanfiction. Thanks to them it feels like second tier instead.

There's a scene where Cloud is baptising a bunch of kids at the end that makes you realize Japanese people like making movies with symbolism regardless of what that symbolism actually means. What were they thinking making this scene? Why was this scene in there? I was thinking that through this and pretty much any other scene where someone wasn't kicking ass. The movie seems focused on putting in every single idea that anyone working on the movie had, regardless of it's affect on the plot, pacing, or cost of production. The worst characters are focused on while the characters people care about get maybe a single scene at most. The love story is focused on in several places, but, much like most other plot threads in this movie, never tied up. Comedy relief is thrown in haphazardly, and Sephiroth's one-liners are enough to make me want anger management classes.

I should probably tidy this up and make it less ranty, but I'm leaving it where it is. I'm glad I saw the movie and I'm even glad I own it, if for no other reason than to reiterate to myself that games and movies are different, and that amazing art, great effects, and nostalgic love don't make a trainwreck feel any less tragic. My memories are tarnished, but what the hell, goodbye FFVII, I hardly knew ye.

-Wes
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[dark steve]

Yeah it's pretty bad.

Also I thought Tseng was dead?

[Swimmy]

Matrix Reloaded bad? Damn. Glad I've avoided it.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[dark steve]

Matrix Revolutions bad.

[DonMarco]

[Lockeownzj00]

I think there's a lot of undule FF-bashing going on here.

For every defiant claim that you have overcome your past ignorant self's propensity to "go with the FF crowd" and love all of its incarnations, you are failing to realise how trendy it is to do a 360 on it all and swear your loyalty to shmups and Vib Ribbon.

This is not to say there are not valid criticisms, just that I do believe there might be some jumping which may or may not be related to bandwagons in this here thread.

I treat the Final Fantasy series like the solid Sci-fi novels of yore. I'm not talking Kilgore Trout, I'm talking a series you know represents a certain standard of quality and adventure. Those who rag on the game for having "the same system" every time (which I find hilarious, since they often don't) miss the point. As "cliche" as the stories have been alleged to be, the entire purpose is to transport you into a new world each time. Granted, with FFI, it was a threadbare plot. But the series has developed a standard now.

So it's been led astray a few times. So what? Why are things like Time Compression unbelievable? Just how much realism do you need in your fantasy? Chimeras and magic aren't pushing your limits, but the moment someone says Time Compression they've crossed the line? Where's the consistency?

Final Fantasy VI is the most cherished, for me. I truly think it stands the test of time. No, it is not Tolstoy. It's a video-game from the 90s. And it still manages to be quite the epic, interactive adventure. So townspeople still randomly tell you things. So Kefka is a egomaniacal jester. So...what? The game manages to pull off multiple, engaging plotlines, and that's a successful game, really.

Certain games in the sereis I play more for the video-game element--example, X. I really enjoyed the battle system. Some, I do for both--Final Fantasy V is extremely silly while retaining a magical feeling, and pulls off a fantastic job system at the same time. IX manages to throw in some innovative ways to give you an illusion of control over the plot, and feels almost exactly like IV, V, and VI had a threeway. It's simplistic (IV), light-hearted (V), and yet retains at the very least a mildly interesting story (VI).

Hell. I don't even understand the Dragon Quest fetish. I'd take a decent battle system with a story over a progress-quest any day. I even bought DQVIII recently, and I'm apprehensive. I've heard its amazing, but despite its aesthetic "beauty" (damn you Akira Toriyama, I can't stop thinking I'm playing Dragonball!), I'm already getting agitated at its absurdly stupid story.

[seryogin]

Tolstoy sucks, you know. Final Fantasy VIII does not (see quarter, gamer's issue 2 HI MIKE)
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[Zack]

The idea of "time compression" is not bad. When people here are complaining about time compression, they mean time kompression as it was integrated into Final Fantasy VIII -- badly, suddenly, confusingly, senselessly, why? Somewhere out there in the array of all possible realities is a great game that just nails time compression. It ain't Final Fantasy VIII.

What the hell does Vib Ribbon have to do with this? Pavlov's dog? You hear "FF sucks" and the FF-hater you imagine loves Vib Ribbon, so it all comes pouring out?

I think your post is a little scattershot and a little angry.

Don't play Dragon Quest if you're apprehensive about it. It's not a game you can force yourself to enjoy. Also, if you don't like Akira Toriyama's artwork, dude, you picked the wrong Dragon Quest like it was your job to suck at picking Dragon Quests.

Do you think that the disconnect between the things you do (cut goblins with swords) and the things that you see (teenage angst), actually improves the games? Because I would like to hear you say it, and I would like to hear you explain.

[seryogin]

I like teenage angst, because I have yet to mature beyond the age of fifteen. I'm serious.
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[GSL]