It is the pinnacle of Nomura’s Belt period, before he moved into the Zipper period of early Kingdom Hearts, and then the Plaid years with KH3.
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Part of it’s that the outfits are full of flowing textiles and loose dangling trinkets, but the early PS2 engine is only capable of rendering stiff models.
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to think that this was included in the D&D 3rd edition player’s handbook a year before FFX came out
truly, nomura wasn’t the only belt fanatic active in the early 00s
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Gotta be an outgrowth of like, Matrix club leather stuff yeah
weren’t there like x men characters who looked like that in the 90s? who was belts patient zero…
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i was really struck by the sheer frequency of random encounters when i last played ffx – the contrast was particularly sharp because i’d just played through 7 and 8. combat is not really what ff7 is interested in, and although ff8 has more complicated and annoying systems, you can pretty easily turn encounters down or off, and in fact the scaling means you’re better off avoiding them. ffx, though, has so many sections that are effectively corridors punctuated by encounter after encounter after encounter.
this section of (someone’s paraphrase of) an interview with kitase and co. (from around the time that the re-release came out) has stuck in my mind and maybe explains something about that shift. tsuchida is credited as “battle director” for ff13 as well, which also has an awful lot of combat in it.
The interviewer points out how other systems like the sphere grid also FFX very unique compared to previous games, and Kitase says that it ended up so different because they left handling the systems to battle director Tsuchida Toshiro, creator of the Front Mission series [....]
Nojima says that Tsuchida's method of doing things was a "cultural revolution" for them, and Kitase elaborates, saying that Tsuchida approached things with a logic-based method: For example, when making maps, he would consider how many meters the player would walk before getting into a battle, decide how many battles they player should get into, and then calculate how big the map should be based on that.
Up till then, the FF team had prioritized story and visuals, and designed the game based on them, such as by having art director Naora Yusuke freely draw backgrounds and then after they were done think about how to include them in the game. Tsuchida, on the other hand, started with raw numbers, and characters and story followed after.
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holy mackerel this really does feel like it explains a lot about FFX
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kind of a proc gen aesthetic
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guhhhhahhhhhh Up until then the FF team had prioritized THE THINGS THAT MADE FINAL FANTASY STAND OUT
like i am crunch-forward in most RPG cases, i dont like it when anyone else tries a final fantasy aesthetics-forward numbers-back approach, but they were the guys who did that! it was fun when they did it! In the best FFs the numbers are just there to shove you forward through all the stupid/cool set pieces
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ffvii was the first “proper” rpg i’d played (i had previously played soliel, light crusader, link to the past, and link’s awakening), and i don’t think i paid attention to the numbers at all. i equipped materia based on which cool powers i wanted characters to have, and equipped equipment based on how many materia slots they offered.
so i guess what @sleepysmiles says checks out
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this literally explains how they ruined mainline final fantasy by not letting the artists be in charge to an otherwise silly degree
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the front mission guy has been one of historys great villains this whole time apparently
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when i think about this series, ff7 is the one that stands out to me. ff7 is probably more important to me than any other game.
it’s interesting to think about this because ~20 years ago, when i first entered the greater insert credit – and later select button – orbit, i had some difficulty reconciling my love of ff7 with my then-nascent ideas about what constituted “good” design. now, much older and marginally wiser, i can recognize that a game doesn’t have to be designed “well” to be powerful or inspiring.
if you had asked me, before i played ff7 (at age 11 in december 1999), what my favorite game was, i would probably have said, like, “oh, i love that legend of zelda: ocarina of time.”
i liked ocarina of time because it was interesting to play with in the way that a puzzle box is interesting to play with. like, ocarina is about solving puzzles in dungeons with various tools, or figuring out how to beat bosses by studying their patterns.
ocarina of etc has a “story,” but the story is a thin skein over this regularized structure: you go to 3 places and collect 3 things, and then there’s a transition to part 2 of the game, and now you’ve got to go to 5 places to collect 5 things. then you go to one last place and you finish the game.
i remember that, in starting ff7, given my then-knowledge of what videogames were and how videogames were designed, i saw that intro movie and thought: ah, i see, there are 8 of these reactors, and clearly each is a dungeon with a boss in it. probably at the end i’ll go to the middle and fight a guy there.
if you approach ff7 in that naive way, the game actually does seem to follow that pattern at first. you start off, after all, in the “no. 1 reactor,” and the boss you fight there, the big scorpion, actually does have a pattern you’re supposed to figure out.
(yet even here, a certain amount of messiness intrudes, if you’re playing the game in english - the infamous “attack while it’s [sic] tail’s up! it’s gonna counterattack with its laser” is some shit nintendo never would have let into a zelda game, smh, etc).
and after this, things kind of go sideways, right – you go to sector “7” and then you go to the “no. 5 reactor.” you get separated from your friends. you meet the dipshit flower girl. you dress up like a woman. all of this stuff happens, and i didn’t anticipate any of it.
ff7 is not nearly as intricate or toylike or “well designed” as something like zelda, and this becomes increasingly apparent the further you play into it, because the “game” part of it is pretty haphazard and broken. the combat is perfunctory, the “dungeons,” such as they are, are tiny. none of this matters, because the “game” part of ff7 is wholly incidental to the storytelling, which is what it really cares about.
(it’s perhaps worth pointing out that ff6 credits both kitase and ito as “director” – and in some interview, maybe on shmupulations dot com, sakaguchi says “yeah, they split those duties – kitase was in charge of all the event scenes and ito was in charge of all the combat stuff.” ff7 credits kitase alone as director, because ito to my understanding was working on ff tactics. who was in charge of the combat stuff in ff7? could it be possible that the answer is “no one”?)
the result of playing ff7 at a young age was i think a realization, for me, that 1) you can use a videogame primarily to tell a story, and 2) that rules. i found and still find this deeply inspiring.
you know, i look at something like ff7r, a game about which i have complicated feelings (at its best it sets my nerdy heart afire; at its worst it makes me feel, i imagine, like star wars guys felt when they watched episode 1 back in the day – i used to mock those guys, and now i’m like: fuck) and ff7r is, undeniably, informed by those sort of school of miyamoto “design principles” that ocarina of time once represented.
structurally, the original ff7 is a long, pretty breathlessly-paced story that doesn’t really ever stop to make you do what i might call “videogame shit.” you’re almost always moving forward, rarely revisiting previous maps to find new paths that just opened up. you don’t really collect things. “new mechanics” sometimes pop up in the form of weird minigames (squatting in wall market, jumping with mister dolphin) that you play once and never again.
ff7r is – to, i think, its detriment – much more of a videogame. the squats aren’t something you only do once and never again. the squats are an entire Thing, where you have three ranks with increasingly good prizes, and later on the squats game becomes the pull up game, which is kind of the same Thing, but harder, and it, too, has 3 ranks.
there’s a symmetry in its structure, such that it’s neatly divided into 18 chapters. there’s an early-game chapter with some side quests, clearly delineated as such, that seed stories. in a mid-game chapter, more side-quests develop those stories. in a late-game chapter, a final set of side quests neatly resolves them.
the original game had those “affection mechanics,” where you got a lot of dialogue choices and what you said affected how tifa or the dipshit flower girl (or barret, or yuffie) “felt about you.” those mechanics were opaque, inconsistent, and buggy.
7r has “affection mechanics” too. in 7r there’s the “tifa sidequest chapter” and the “dipshit flower girl sidequest chapter.” then there’s a decision point halfway through the game where you land in the sewers (the sewers which, in true videogame level form, no longer constitute two screens and are instead fucking interminable, and you even go through them multiple times). when you wake up, you see tifa and the dipshit flower girl lying on the ground equidistant from you on either side. this is, in true bioshock HARVEST/RESCUE? style, a binary choice. the one you wake up first is the one whose scene you see at the end (unless you triggered the barret fail-state which i guess it undercuts my point somewhat to admit i still don’t know how to do in 7r).
we might say that ffx represents a meaningful step on the path to this kind of codification.
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FF7 does have a real lightning captured in a bottle quality, it’s a bizarre ambitious mess of a game that happened to hit at just the right time. You cant really analyze it in a formal way or “edit” it into a remake without completely altering it
So i have only played a little bit of FF10. it was my ex’s favorite game so i have some Loaded Feelings about it but i’d still be interested in finishing it someday (which isnt the same thing as saying "I Will Finish It Someday ofc lol). What i think defines most of the FF games ive completed (1-7, also interested in finishing 8-9 someday!!) isnt just that theyre Story Focused but more particularly Setpiece Focused. every one of them from 3 onward tries to keep you moving forward into some new exciting plot beat, that goes hand in hand with some new weird game hook.
7 is the golden example of that. like my understanding is the remake adapts the whole Midgar opening act, which makes sense because it’s the most memorable part of the game. but like, that “memorable” for most folks applies mostly to the big plot beats that happen – the two reactor sabotages, the slums getting crushed, Cloud falling a thousand feet through the roof of a church and coming out with a few bruises and a new girlfriend who encourages him to crossdress, the assault on Shinra HQ and subsequent city escape (follow me, set me free etc). What you forget until you actually play all that shit in FF7 is an infinitely weirder more disjointed series of events. there’s that squat mini game so you can win lady’s underwear. there’s the part where you try to rescue Aeris from the Turks by like, kicking barrels at them. there’s Don Corneo. there’s Don Corneo dropping you down a trapdoor into the sewers where you fight a water monster. fuck, everything that happens in wall market tbh. you can get into random battles with giant robot houses
None of this shit translates to a story that’s legible on paper. it’s basically a little kid describing a weird dream to you, “and then THIS happened and then THIS and then and then” In the context of a big long video game though it works, because you want to see what kind of wild shit you get to do next. And then occasionally you get served up a cool, genuinely memorable plot moment like Cloud and Tifa surreally wandering through Clouds memories after he gets pulled out of the Lifestream
Im sure the Front Mission guys approach works well in Front Mission. i dont think there’s anything wrong with trying something different and in theory putting a little more of the mechanical crunch on front (mission) street. That paragraph about meting out the exact number of battles per square foot of map though, uugghhhh that aint it. That is some MMO numerically precise focus testing bullcrap. which-- come to think of it, the very next FF game was an MMO, huh. And when they pulled in a director who could do intricate mechanics for 12 they also loaded a bunch of MMO shit onto his plate.
So perhaps MMOs are the true villain of modern FF
(though the most popular modern FF is also an MMO. so like, who’s laughing)
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I really gotta play 9, I guess.
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one important aspect of that lightning-in-a-bottle quality ff7 has is that it carves out this dramatic idiom that’s incredibly successful but that’s also idiosyncratic and fragile – idiosyncratic because of the peculiarities of the tools it has (real-time figures against pre-rendered backdrops, the occasional brief cinematic segue, looping sequenced music) and fragile because the exigencies of technology meant they had to leave all those tools behind just a few years later.
the ff7 scene that maybe best illustrates what i mean is the one where you talk to elmyra about the dipshit flower girl (hereafter “aeris,” for convenience). this is a sequence of the game that is like five minutes long, but so much of what happens in it is formally interesting.
some of what’s interesting here borrows from the snes games (for eg, the distinction between blue-boxed dialogue and unboxed narration). some of it builds on them (the way the little polygonal characters emote and express themselves). some of it is new (the shifting perspectives).
the result is, again, this idiom that is specific to videogames, maybe even specific to this videogame. i think ff8 also does some interesting stuff (mainly with the way it uses rendered cinematics), but i’d argue that in general the subsequent squaresoft polygonal-characters-on-prerendered-backdrop psx games are significantly less audacious or ambitious in the way they strain against the comparatively primitive tools they have to tell their story.
interesting things about this scene:
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as soon as cloud walks into the house, the track playing changes to an arrangement of aeris’s theme that you will not hear again until she dies.
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your view of the house is such that you see the living room edge-on, as though peering at a diorama suspended in a black field. you can see the stairs and the landing above. beyond that, nothing.
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elmyra’s not looking at cloud, but she hears his approach, and greets him without turning around. cloud lowers his head as he tells her that aeris has been captured. elmyra, still not looking at him, turns to face the stairs as she tells him she knows. only when cloud expresses his surprise at this does she turn around, but when he approaches her and wants to know more, she turns her back to him again before speaking.
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as she starts to talk about the past, she looks up. as if following her gaze, the “camera” moves upward. the room, and everyone in it, slides off the bottom of the screen, and you’re left looking at that black field.
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elmyra’s narration (“one day…i got a letter saying he was coming home”) is naked text against the black. then the screen goes white, and you see the sector 7 train station from above.
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in a prolonged scene with no dialogue, you watch elmyra approach the train. the screen fades to white again, and your perspective shifts – now you’re closer to the ground. you see elmyra at the bottom of the screen, a guard near the train door, and two women across from him.
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the train door opens. someone steps out. his shoulders shake. you gather that the shaking shoulders mean “this person is laughing.” one of the women runs to him. they embrace. the man spins the woman around. elmyra gives the slightest shake of her head as they approach her, and then she runs aside to let them pass. they walk off together.
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another couple is reunited. this time the woman spins the man around – this is a different couple, with a different relationship. as they walk away, the woman pauses in front of elmyra while the man looks on. they’re speaking. still no dialogue here, but you can intuit what their conversation’s about. elmyra bows and they leave.
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as the conductor starts to close the door, elmyra runs to him. she shakes her head slowly; he shakes his head. dejected, she walks to the stairs and sits down. her shoulders shake, but this time, you know the shaking shoulders mean “this person is crying.”
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another fade to white. the perspective shifts – once again, the sector 7 train station from above. superimposed on the view, elmyra’s narration, naked text: “my husband never came back.”
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fade to white after “and then, one day…” and you see elmyra entering the train station, her walk leisurely at first, but then she starts running. she’s approaching ifalna, who’s lying near the bottom of the stairs, and aeris, who is watching her, shoulders shaking (she’s crying). there is, again, no dialogue here, but when elmyra kneels next to ifalna, aeris runs to her.
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ifalna’s body gives a sudden lurch, and now the screen is tinted red. elmyra’s narration: “you used to see this sort of thing a lot during the war.”
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when the red tint lifts, elmyra and aeris are hugging. fade to white, then fade to black. elmyra: “aeris and i became close very quickly…”
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now that edge-on view of the living room slides back up the screen. at first you only see the stairs – and aeris is descending. by the time the whole room is in view, cloud & co are gone – but elmyra is there. you understand, immediately, that you’re seeing the same room, but in the past.
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as elmyra continues to reminisce, aeris runs to the door, beyond the bounds of the diorama, and disappears. as the “camera” follows her, the room slides offscreen. it comes back into view, but this time, you see that elmyra’s talking to cloud (and by now, she’s facing him). you’re in the present again.
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barret asks a question, and elmyra responds. then you see a dialogue box: “mom,” but attributed to aeris. elmyra turns to the stairs, and the room starts to slide offscreen – but stops at a point where all you can see is the stairs and, below them, the top of elmyra’s head. as aeris walks down the stairs, the “camera” follows her, and when you see the whole room, you see that cloud & co are gone again. now we’re back in the past.
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aeris says “please don’t cry,” and that’s in a dialogue box, but elmyra’s subsequent narration (“aeris just blurted that out all of a sudden”) is naked text.
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this time the room slides offscreen yet again, but, unusually, this time it slides horizontally, rather than vertically – it moves left. in the blackness, elmyra says “but…,” and we think we know what’s coming. when we see the room again, sure enough, elmyra’s seated at the dining table, crying.
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the room slides offscreen horizontally again, this time to the right. the last horizontal slide signaled someone’s death. this one signals tseng’s arrival. aeris runs out the door, and the “camera” follows her, moving diagonally, for the first and last time.
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when we see the living room again, we see it from a different angle – straight down, from the top. the story is over.
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the formally/structurally interesting stuff in this part of the game is over, too, but i can’t resist pointing out how fucking good barret’s speech to elmyra (“please don’t start with that. i’m always thinkin’ about what might happen to marlene, if i…”) is. i cry everytiem. love this game 4 real.
by ffx they’ve abandoned many of the techniques here. kitase has said that the ability to, for example, include voice acting in these games was hugely important to him. this makes sense given that kitase has also said that he wanted to make films before he got into videogames, and certainly the storytelling in these games has gotten more “cinematic.” is that necessarily better?
this same scene, with elmyra relating the story of how she met aeris and so on, appears in ff7r. it is exactly what you would expect: a long videogame cut-scene. the flashback parts are in sepia. it looks like some shit out of a tv movie.
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Thank you for breaking that down. They had learned a very top-down limited animation way to tell their stories. like in FF4 all the world sprites could do was raise one little pixel hand up, and that was used to communicate moments as varied as “the party does a mutual excited fist pump” and “Cecil slaps Edward into shape and tells him to get over watching his fiancee die in front of him”
then 5 added SHOCK and LOL animations and the little finger waggle that 6 used with aplomb in its bigger sprites
its such a strange specific flavor of 7 that it wants to have these more detailed human proportioned models in combat and occasionally in FMV cutscenes, but pairs them with your little kewpie doll guys in the field and in MOST FMV cutscenes doing shrugs and LOLs and fingerless finger-waggles with their hamhock Popeye ass limbs
its a real specific language of videogame storytelling that idk im sure i could extrapolate from to bitch about The Last of Us or whatever, if i ever even wanted to play games like that. its stage vs screen. how many resources are you willing to extend to get audience buy-in vs just asking them to put in a little of the work
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As someone suffering all of the PC Engine JRPG library this summer, dang Final Fantasy is cool.
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More I think about it its just like elements of cartooning & animation that i love. models used for “close” or “near” characters that have appropriate visual complexity, details of size & scale being exaggerated to create the right feeling for the moment, changing frames per second economically based on whats happening in the story (like a flashy fight scene will have more fluidity than a talky exposition scene)
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