the only part where I felt chrono trigger’s pacing faltered was right before the end where the game explicitly gives the player an opportunity to tidy up any sidequests they’ve ignored and it saps all the time pressure implied by the rest of the game
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psx ‘final fantasy origins’ probably the best way to play the first two. the psp ports have some bonus dungeon stuff but you might find that extraneous (and i think they have weirdly high system requirements for emulation too)
re: ff3 i vaguely recall @Tuxedo making some really good posts on this a while back? go nes
don’t think any of them are really that notable though
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I haven’t replayed FF6 in too long to articulate why I loved its pacing, I just remember I always did (at least in World of Balance). I suppose those tangents were just the sort of spice I needed to stay interested.
As for Chrono Trigger, yeah pretty much, the first time you’re dumped in the future alone is enough of a pacing disaster for me to criticize the entire game on that basis. I don’t think saying it fits the atmosphere of the future is a good defense considering A) there is also cheerful motorcycle racing in Chrono Trigger’s future, B) that sort of artsy effect is not really what Chrono Trigger is about in general. I quit playing there on like 2 out of ~7 of my plays of Chrono Trigger. My partner also mentioned to me she quit Chrono Trigger there the one time she played it on a real SNES at the time.
I also had a problem with Millennial Fair right at the beginning. This is probably a bit of personal idiosyncrasy, but when I sit down to start playing a JRPG I really don’t feel like going to a fair to aimlessly play some minigames while waiting to accidentally trigger the disparate scripted events to kick off the real plot. I instead very specifically expected something similar to the exciting opening setpiece of FF6. I gave up at the early-game fair on like another 2 of my 7 plays. (My 3 plays where I made it past the future, I beat the game.)
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yeah, this is exactly what cut my last playthrough short
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the biggest problem with the pacing in ff6 is that the scenario split section (which I still think it super rad and well done overall) is really uneven, like sabin’s scenario is kind of too long, locke’s is paced I think pretty perfectly, and then terra/edgar’s is over before it starts. and idk I love them all as their own thing I think it can be kind of awkward on your first playthrough and you don’t know what to expect.
but aside from that I think the world of balance has masterful pacing. it’s never out of step with the emotional content of the story or the game design itself. the first major lull is after terra screeches out into the wilderness and leaves your party, which is a fairly shocking and emotionally dramatic scene if for no other reason than the game sets the expectation that she is the protagonist, so it is really fitting to have a moment where you’re sort of lost and confused, and the world map opens up like just enough to nudge you in the right direction without leaving you with the classic “what the fuck do I do now” JRPG thing. then the pace gradually builds back up after you find her again in zozo, and you get a satisfying mechanical payoff of gaining magiciate/espers as well as the accompanying backstory for terra. all of it so smooth and confidently put together.
chrono trigger’s pacing is fun and satisfying but kind of has the adhd quality to it where it can’t really focus on anything for more than a single story beat. and like… the character development is just paper thin compared to ff6. I don’t know. on some level it’s apples and oranges I guess.
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I thought chrono trigger was really well paced cuz I was like oh this is like the part where Goku powers up before fighting the big bad guy and I felt fucking awesome getting strong and making my friends strong but maybe I was just really charmed by playing it for the first time
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is final fantasy 2 worth playing at all lol? seems like everyone hates it.
yeah and despite my annoyance with final fantasy 6 doing this too I feel like it’s still more narratively coherent because you aren’t trying to prevent the end of the world, at that point it’s just a matter of building your resources enough to get revenge. I just wish the world of ruin was more focused after you get the airship, so much of the writing feels thin across the various side quests you can do. honestly, this was my biggest problem with 6 but on my last playthrough I enjoyed the world of ruin way more than I ever had in the past so like idek, maybe my complaints are just fossils of that period of my life.
anyway final fantasy 6 fucking rules
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This is reasonable; it’s so poppy that it almost always wants you to be different inflections of totally pumped when you’re playing. I’m so into the specific aesthetics of that future that it never bothers me.
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I have no idea what they were thinking with either figaro castle sequence, the game makes you trust that it’s doing something(??) that isn’t consistent with what’s before or after it
like, kefka and edgar both have such bizarre, breathless introductions for how important they are to the plot and the tone, and the gerad bit isn’t really interesting
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All the way back to Dragon Quest 1 I think castles are the poorer cousin of RPG towns. All the pacing problems towns can already cause, in what’s usually a very-restrictive theme and stacked symmetrical staircases.
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you’re tripping tho bc the figaro castle sequence in the world of balance where you meet edgar is great. idk what you’re talking about.
the gerad thing is kind of weird and just doesn’t make sense. it makes a little more sense playing with a better translation, but it still feels like they wanted to have this cool surprise reveal and really didn’t think through how to write it effectively.
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At least FF1/2 really need a “Sega Ages Phantasy Star”-style critical edition otherwise the best way to play them is not to play them (perhaps watch some speedruns of them instead). (If you have not played Sega Ages Phantasy Star, then play that! It’s a way more interesting 80s JRPG anyway)
EDIT: I just remembered some posts where you parsed the difference between the two variant soundtracks in Phantasy Star so I am preaching to the choir here, never mind
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I love both these games, but in Chrono Trigger, my patience with its non-boss combat is seriously waning by the time the party first reaches 65,000,000 BC, and after visiting 12,000 BC, it’s gone completely. Thanks in large part to the Moogle Charm, I don’t have that problem wtih FF6.
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Well, you can run away from Chrono Trigger’s non-boss combat. It’s just that nobody ever does because it’s profoundly unintuitive that it’s even possible to do so, and strangely unsatisfying when you do, given the abstraction level they went with. Even I, who always has a fully maxed-out Chicken Knife in FF5, hardly ever think to run away in Chrono Trigger.
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it helps if you explicitly anticipate it as subverting the “visit to a castle” sequence from jrpgs of that era but I’m not sure how well that holds up in hindsight compared to the rest of the generally timeless steampunk stuff
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The problem is that irl castles are explicitly the closest real analog to dungeons (artificially hostile architecture, notoriously dark and cramped and desolate) but they’re signposted the opposite in jrpgs.
Like even without hostile enemies, castles should be somewhere you can never fully internalize. Symmetrical staircases totally miss the archtectural purpose of the space
Maybe if there was a japanese translation of gormenghast, we would have some good castles in jrpgs
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Yeah I was blown away by the real life castles I have visited and I didn’t really see it coming what their particular appeal would be, probably because JRPG castles bored me.
It probably depends on the era of castle we’re talking about though. There are many different castle vibes
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Am I the only person who likes the World of Ruin? It’s like someone got a SaGa game all over my Final Fantasy endgame except I just spent 25hrs meeting everyone and there’s, you know, context. I honestly loved just flying around in the Falcon looking for things I thought were interesting until I decided to kill Kefka.
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