speaking of questionable pacing, chapter 17 of ffviir has basically made me put it down all of 90 minutes from the end
of all the extra dungeons that don’t fit this is the most egregious
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What I don’t understand is why Horii hasn’t collaborated with one of the FF teams since CT, especially now that they’ve been part of the same company for 18 years.
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they don’t want that nerd harshin the vibe
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this is a much cooler reason than me stopping in chapter 9 because I have crippling anxiety about putting Aerith in danger
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there’s something funny about being stuck in the end of time indefinitely, just loading up your savestate every few months and going, “ehhhh, i’ll get back to it later”…
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It felt so padded
horii working with an ff team on a new portopia serial murders instead of a jarpeg please
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I’ve played FF1-3 multiple times !
It’s safe to play any recent version of FF1-2 like the PSP one (available on the vita store) they reduce grinding and NES harshness a bit without being aesthetic crimes like the more modern FF5-6 remakes are
FF3 NES is the best version because the FF3 remake additions all go against the spirit and uniqueness of the game. FF3 has a job system that does not reward you for staying in the same job. As a result there is no long term planning. You find a bunch of good viking equipment in a dungeon : Why not, let’s switch Bob to viking. Every class gets a chance to shine, unlike any other job game, where you sort of have to stay in the same class for a while to learn new abilities, and just never end up trying out chemist / hunter / geomancer / bard.
Nes FF3 game expects you to adapt and switch classes often and will sometimes have hard requirements (you need a black mage to transform every team member into a lilliput to enter a dungeon, you need a samurai to kill self-replicating enemies, etc), culminating in an extremely difficult boss battle in which the best strategy is to change the entire party to dragoons and just do nothing but jump over and over, which is hinted at in an optional dungeon nearby where you can find multiple sets of dragoon equipment! FF3 feels very fresh and breezy and is definitely one of my favourite NES games.
FF3 Remake gives big stat bonuses for staying in the same job based on # of battles, which ruins the entire job system ; switching jobs now carries harsh, long term consequences and will leave your character crippled for a long while. In fact the way to get the most damage is to pick a warrior at the beginning and just stay in that job forever, which is mind boggling. The game also adds mundane Octopathish writing that bogs down the pacing.
FF1 is not very remarkable but pretty cool as a sort of romanticized japanese version of D&D dungeon exploration circa 1987
FF2 is not great at all but interesting! It introduced tragedy to FF and just leaned hard on that : Every fucking character seems to have a tragic death in that game to the point where there’s basically nothing left to save at the end. It also sort of has terrible pacing and directions ; that time when you get the boat and are completely free to wander the world is a total nightmare.
Mechanics are proto SaGa and VERY EASY to break which is a huge part of the charm, to a point where I haven’t been able to play it normally, ever. The last time I played it I killed all my characters except Maria and gave her a bunch of spells; by the middle of a game I had a megabuff invincible Maria who cast TOAD in every random battle, instantly winning by invoking a frog rain that turned every enemy into a frog with 100% accuracy. Absolute Frog Queen. This was such a better power fantasy than killing enemies with a big sword
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I played a fair bit of FF1 using this guy’s hack and remember it making the battles fairly compelling. Was a long time ago though:
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okay I’m sold
I realize what you mean regarding pacing–although Trigger’s endgame bothers me way less than the usual post-FFIV endgame, with the possible exception of V’s-- but I also want to argue: time travel. It makes absolute sense to me that once all the answers are obtained and the micro-threats are dealt with there’d be no urgency to the problem of Lavos–especially since Zeal is just happy to float and do nothing (arguably a storytelling problem). Not only do they have literally 13,999 years to solve the problem, the endgame comes just after they actually did try to defeat Lavos, and failed miserably. A “let’s take a moment to pump ourselves up to try again” arc really works, I feel.
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Is Chrono Trigger’s endgame pacing a metaphor for climate change
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the most personally influential sidequest
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i sapped myself and created this amber for you.
i mean, “the future refused to change” pops into my head all the time, more and more as i get older, and… idk, even as a kid that line carried some indescribable weight as an enigmatic metaphor for cosmic, catastrophic, inevitable and repeated failure. so, yeah, i think climate change is absolutely at least one thing you can read into chrono trigger.
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It’s def one of the great game over screens
Tho in saying that I had in mind the angle where it feels like there is all the time in the world to fix the problem, the heroes run around doing sidequests for years and only remember the Black Omen is a thing whenever they happen to fly by it, whereupon they experience a brief instant of cognitive dissonance before returning to the sidequest
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even moreso if they already cleaned it out to max robo’s speed then bailed on Lavos after zeal
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right, sorry, my mind went to the game over scenario because that’s the obvious end result of never moving beyond the limbo state of the end of time… yeah?
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