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Final Fantasy Thread


Yantelope
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  1. 1. What is the best FInal Fantasy?



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To me Final Fantasy was about story. Square lost its way when they started making FF games without even having the story written. Also I find it funny that people love the gameplay of FF games so much. I remember many people who wouldn't play the FF games when they were new because the gameplay was static and not like an action game. I always felt the gameplay was a sacrifice in order to have a sweeping world and a big story.

Edited by Yantelope V2
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Final Fantasy to me was always about 3 things - fighting, story, and music.

You spend about 80% of of FF games fighting, so in that regard FF13 succeeded to me. The battle system was solid. Besides paradigm shifting, it was basically the same as the previous FF games. FF13 failed in the fact that it took you a long time for the battles to get difficult. You had to either fight bosses or do the hunt missions to see how versatile the battle system was, which was lame.

The story of FF13 was hit or miss. It wasnt anything special, it was squarely down the middle. Ive played so many terrible jrpgs these last few years(Eternal Sonata, Cross Edge, Star Ocean: the Last Hope), that FF13 at least didnt annoy me. Besides Vanille. In a sense, ive grown to accept not-so-terrible jrpg stories. Aside from Nier, I dont think Japan has written anything worthwhile in a long time.

The music was lame though. Not terrible, but nothing really special. But that goes for most videogames. I really dont like modern videogame music. I blame that on the emphasis on voiceacting and cutscenes. Games have gone with moviestyle sountracks. Orchestrated stuff without a melody meant to change moods. I think back then good music was a necessity since voiceacting wasnt around.

 

Ive never really cared about boring equipment and spell menus, inane dialogue with townspeople, or half-assed minigames. To me thats just something rpgs did, not something that I needed.

 

I liked FF13 a lot, but id never say it was one of the best. Its also not one of the worst.

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@Mistwalker: Eh, they've remnants of Sacnoth/Nautilus, creators of a series far better than Final Fantasy in every way I care about. So I'll expect more from Mistwalker than Squeenix if choosing between the two.

 

I think I've made my feelings for Final Fantasy after VI vivid either in this thread or elsewhere; yet I could finish previous Final Fantasy titles. XIII was just beyond me. I literally forced myself (with a grimace) to pick up the controller every time I did and tread farther into the game. Until the time arrived when I could no longer suffer the damn thing. It was somewhere around the tower.

 

Edit: The two songs from FFXIII I enjoyed were:

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDfqCNgeHTU

Edited by Saturnine Tenshi
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I think the problem with XIII was that they made a story and a lovely looking world and wanted to somehow fit that into a game, as easily as possible. So they just put you on straight lines to and from the next cutscene and battle, its game development at its most basic.

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Well, as I postulated before, you can piece toegether exactly what went wrong with FFXIII and it's a bit of a Charlie Foxtrot.

 

First, they clearly started building assets and making the game without having the story written as they came out later and reported that the story was finally complete... in 2008. 4 years after the initial development began. Then the producer made the claim that the game was too linear beacuse it was story driven. Well how can that be if the story wasn't even done until 4 years after development started? Then you hear that an entire game's worth of content had been cut from the game during development which futher fuels speculation that the initial development of the game was directionless and sloppy.

 

Clearly Square started to make a Final Fantasy with no direction or story and couldn't even piece all their parts together properly so they sewed it up in a linear fashion and slapped a story on top of it. Play it though again and you'll notice instantly that this is the case. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is almost certainly that original game's cut content haphazardly thrown back into another mesh of a game.

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I think you're misunderstanding when they say the story was finally completed. While they would have had the story written already and much of the game developed, they wouldn't have had all of the storyboards transformed into cut scenes and cinematics, script edits, etc. It would be virtually impossible to create a game like FFXIII without having the story written before development begins proper.

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It would be virtually impossible to create a game like FFXIII without having the story written before development begins proper.

 

I dunno, the story in FFXIII was pretty bad.

 

I've only experienced a third of it but I'll happily take your word for it! :lol:

 

I'm too lazy to go searching for it now but did Nomura make a comment before along the lines of "I got to make Versus XIII because FFXIII was turning out to be a P.O.S"? That's very liberal paraphrasing but I remember him making a comment like that.

 

To sum up my thoughts on FFXIII: I'd watch it if it was a feature length movie and probably enjoy it a lot....but as far as games go, I'd rather play Dirge of Cerberus. Also, Dirge of Cerberus is a very underrated game.

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The story was one of the best parts (and the music). But maybe it was just a bit too much for some players? With all the God of Wars and the Halos these days, maybe it had just a bit too much depth.

 

In my opinion its nothing to do with the story being 'too' deep. If that's the case everyone would have hated Mass Effect's story as well or other similar game stories that were....well the focus of the game. Its not very deep especially on the Final Fantasy scale, I mean your not really given an opportunity to care about anyone outside of Sazh. it also wasn't very well scripted, with plot developments that are important being listed in that read chapter part of the menus, rather than being told in a cutscene, which blew my mind.

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Well gents, I don't know. I liked the game a lot, I don't see how people could NOT like it, but that's just me. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

EDIT: Just kidding, anyone who doesn't like Final Fantasy XIII is a dirty SOB, especially you, Excel. You're dead to me now.

Edited by TheCowboyPoet
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Well gents, I don't know. I liked the game a lot, I don't see how people could NOT like it, but that's just me. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

EDIT: Just kidding, anyone who doesn't like Final Fantasy XIII is a dirty DOB, especially you, Excel. You're dead to me now.

 

HEY.....SHUT UP....

 

Well even if you do like it its fine, its not the worst game ever, just a big disappointment to me.

 

But, even for someone who liked it like Cowboy, is it not easy to see why some Final Fantasy fans didn't like it? Its missing a lot of stuff that has always been featured in Final Fantasy like proper sidequests, explorable towns, NPCs to talk to, party members you could control, even minigames. All things that the other games in the series had. And that's even before we bring in the things that XIII AND X and XII were missing that IX and the rest had, like controllable airships and worldmaps. Its like a old series coming back and missing stuff that it had that made it what it was. Surely that's easy to see.

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You spend about 80% of of FF games fighting, so in that regard FF13 succeeded to me. The battle system was solid. Besides paradigm shifting, it was basically the same as the previous FF games. FF13 failed in the fact that it took you a long time for the battles to get difficult. You had to either fight bosses or do the hunt missions to see how versatile the battle system was, which was lame.

 

This. Most of the time Relentless Assault with odd Combat Clinic now n then will finish them off. You have to kinda go out your way a bit to make a fight interesting and tactical. The Paradigm system helped a lot in that respect, rather tactical, but the enemies sucked to use it against. I quite liked Lost Odyssey's Ring System, it made the typical "pick option, watch it execute" JRPG system a bit more action orientated (You held down RB until two rings aligned while attacking, it'd cause extra damage/effects depending on the ring you had equipped).

 

As for story I see nothing hugely wrong with FFXIII, it is a game after all, not like most other stories are any better :P (Nier is up next btw, you guys better not be over-hyping it). Music kinda sucked, I liked the old melodies and such, but FFXIII was a bit too poppy. Only one I quite liked was Barthandulus boss fight with the chorus n such.

 

I think towns and mini-games helped to break the constant string of fighting up. That for me was FFXIIIs major downfall, no downtime, the pacing was terrible.

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FF13 failed in the fact that it took you a long time for the battles to get difficult.

 

Huh? How is that not true for every Final Fantasy game? Press X. Heal now and then. There, you just beat 90% of the game.

 

 

Anyways, from the demo of FF13-2, it seems like they've fixed most of these complaints.

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I actually didn't really like Nier, it got a little stale. Something about the old woman and the light house... I don't know, it's been awhile. I did like the music, and the art style of the 2D sections. Also no one seemed surprised to see a flying talking book.

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I actually didn't really like Nier, it got a little stale. Something about the old woman and the light house... I don't know, it's been awhile. I did like the music, and the art style of the 2D sections. Also no one seemed surprised to see a flying talking book.

 

Bullshit. There's a few quotes about it. And bitching about a sidequests? Go properly fuck yourself.

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