I love CocaCola.
8 Likes
The computer power it would have taken to make that ad… it’s next to as crazy as the amount of hours I spent doing Chocobo Hot & Cold tonight.
3 Likes
i just remember something weird ab lvling. like you had to actually put the ds in sleep mode to gather something that you needed in order to lvl? and i got really mad and said ’ don’t tell me how to grind ’ and then i never played it again / sold it to gamestop.
2 Likes
kinda makes me realize that to my knowledge IV is the only game with an actual love triangle between party members. seems weird they wouldn’t use that plot device again. seems like such low-hanging fruit.
8 Likes
Zell got his face tattoo years before Tyson did tho
1 Like
the vagueness of 9’s fourth disc is kind of weird, like they wrap up a lot of the character arcs prior to that and so they wind up mostly fighting the concept of emotional sense memory or something, but then the ending itself is actually very straightforward and sentimental (and good). for a game whose writing is otherwise very sharp I didn’t think they quite stuck the landing
5 Likes
Ah yes, star wars references in final fantasy. That’s completely unprecedented
5 Likes
Amarant feels like such a waste of a character in XI. Comes in super late, doesn’t really have a motivation beyond “I dislike Zidane” and doesn’t get enough time to move beyond that. At least that one drawing Amano did of him was really good.
3 Likes
my first playthrough died on disc IV for this exact reason and I’ve never been motivated to make that far again
the game is pretty much over at that point, it’s just one dungeon and the two optional bosses
the ending is sweet though
I think this works if you care about Kuja after disc 3 but I totally see how it wouldn’t
3 Likes
I think what really put me off was the sudden appearance of obstructing roots blocking off various locations on the overworld, meaning that any lingering sidequests or exploration you wanted to do were just no longer an option. this felt arbitrary to me – I guess there might have been a technical/disc-space reason for this? but I didn’t have any saves before that disc and I remember there were so many places I wanted to go that I just couldn’t reach anymore. it was hard to keep going after that.
I don’t even remember this, but I believe it. it’s kind of an odd choice for a game that’s otherwise very cozy – IX does impose more deliberate pacing limitations on you than a lot of its contemporaries (notably how it plays with your party composition and the availability of different vehicles and parts of the world map at different times, which I adore and think makes 7/8/10 look like they have a hand tied behind their back in terms of jRPG story structure), but to cut you off at the end like that sort of misunderstands how ambitious it is in the first place imo, they should’ve stuck to chrono trigger mindset
I’ve only played it twice, once on release and once in an emulator c. 2013 to reestablish that it’s my favorite mainline entry
yeah, I generally liked that it was more old school in terms of the story impacting your party, as well as their abilities being much more tied to their personality/class/what-have-you. I felt a stronger connection between story and gameplay than I did with 8 or 7 in that way. the random blocking off of areas at the end really soured the whole thing though… I guess VI kind of does this but there aren’t really many optional sidequests in the world of balance, and the game does a decent job broadcasting that the floating continent is a point of no return.
1 Like
I wasn’t playing contemporaneously (maybe in 2003?) but the portal to Terra should be better signposted as the real point of no return
The strategy guide had a ton of information offloaded to a defunct website, by the way, real y2k experience
8 Likes
aren’t you a big ffviii head, doesn’t viii like completely nuke the whole game besides the final dungeon at disc 4
3 Likes
it’s actually a little before disc 4 I think, and the point of no return triggers during the assault on lunatic pandora, and the game makes it very clear that it’s your final mission before you ever enter there.
it’s been too long since I played IX but I don’t remember any kind of signposting like that at all. just suddenly I was on disc IV and I couldn’t go anywhere anymore. maybe there was and I forgot about it? but in viii it always seemed clear that you needed to wrap up your unfinished business before lunatic pandora.
1 Like