I love her so
Nope.
XV is very uneven but vastly more interesting and less high on its own supply than anything they did in the preceding 15 years save for XII (which I think is sadly overrated now if anything, though it’s unevenly interesting in about as many ways as XV in practice).
like I honestly can’t imagine what leads a person to reevaluate X or XIII still, but in the past 5 years they’ve made lots of good games again! late-era XIV is good, nier automata is good, dragon quest xi is good!
squaresoft and fighting games: bad from 2001 to 2016, otherwise pretty great
And thus you explained how for quite a while, 1 and 13 were the only FF games I finished. The only ones added to that list now are 15 and 7R.
this thread just made me remember this guy who sat next to me in my 9th grade science class who was obsessed with “eff eff ecks” and wouldn’t shut up about how he made it past the “seymour flux fight” and stuff like that. every day before class started he was always gawking at official art of yuna on his flip-phone from 2004 — he seemed offended when i eventually asked him “so is this, like, porn to you??”, which in retrospect was probably an offensive question for me to ask
i wonder what happened to him
That man? Today you know him as Donald Trump
in high school we’d meet in the morning to talk about FF Tactics and how to beat Wiegraf, so i feel fortunate in this regard.
@boojiboy7 i can’t tell if your post is sincere or not or if i’m too tired to understand it. so were FF1 and 13 your first games, or are you saying my thesis is flawed?
mostly i was just espousing what i see said around the internet, and it’s usually worked as a potential explainer for why people who are like 10-15 years younger than me love FFX so much.
like i said, i like all the games! but my initial preference was always hoping for something more like VI (ok VII is basically very much like VI but after that the games shift).
Oh no, it is totally sincere. 1 was my first FF game, and really the only one i played a lot of till 12 (which I never finished, but do really like) and then 13 I finished because it was just actually kinda really good.
i believe this
which is why even though all i do is play triple triad my favorite is still ff8 somehow
honestly playing ff8 as some person who just wants to play a card game while a universe-ending conflict is unfolding around them is probably the way to go
“FF8 as metaphor for living in post-capitalist climate apocalypse”
…someone can do something with that I’m sure
my actual first FF game (RPG, at all, actually) was Mystic Quest lol
for years i’d been scared off of RPGs because some store clerk at a Toys R Us told me that Dragon Warrior was probably too hard for someone my age. i also didn’t understand the mechanics of RPGs so i thought in these games you just attacked and hoped you got their numbers down before you died (which, incidentally, is not inaccurate, but is missing some key information).
so for a long time i thought RPGs were not fun games and then my friend bought Mystic Quest for me on my birthday because it was on sale for like $20 and after ignoring it for a few weeks, i played it, called him up and told him how amazing it was, and then suddenly, i became one of those…RPG people.
like in a sense it was fun to be a jrpg fan in the 90s (before FFVII) because it was a self-selecting friend group kind of thing. made it very easy to meet people in my schools who i became close with because we wanted to sit around and eat doritos and play Earthbound together.
i mean honestly Select Button is probably just the virtual continuation of this trend in how i select “friends whom like to game”
weave in 100 pages about being lonely in your high school cafeteria and that is a ‘boss fight books’ pitch if i’ve ever heard one
mine may have been as well, I played that and FFIV and chrono trigger at friends’ houses in what felt like very quick succession before borrowing / renting them on my own
none of my buds had VI or earthbound so I didn’t get around to those until zsnes but that was like… 3 years later
not related to Final Fantasy entirely, but yesterday, i was thinking about how they’d handle the Crono doll/clone thing if they ever remade that game. certain aspects of earlier Square work only really functioned due to the limitations of hardware and expectations of what games could do or be. in a sense, i think FF games are usually super tied to their hardware, moreso than Dragon Quest, at least, which is why FF has so many internal fights about which ones are “the good ones” vs. Dragon Quest which like, any of them after II is basically still really playable as a Dragon Quest game.
yeah VI came out right around the time i got into RPGs, so i rented that one pretty soon after Mystic Quest. was immediately overwhelmed by how much more complex it was, but could clearly see why it was a better game almost instantly.
i’ve never been a huge fan of IV. i enjoy it, but that, to me, is the Gen Xer FF game
Interesting point. I am thinking about how SB1 was mad at DQIX walking back from being an co-op action RPG back to just being Dragon Quest. How now we are comforted when the game in a long running series is the same. What were we on about at the time? Saving JRPGs.
FF5 is my favorite, but it wasn’t my first (I don’t think?), but it was the first I spent any reasonable amount of time on. It probably would’ve been 6 but it was taking too long for the intro to load so I thought the disc was damaged and switched over to the 5 disc. The only reason I wound up even playing Final Fantasy Anthology was because I was at a Hollywood Video at the ass-end of 1999 and overheard some kid asking his mom to help him find Final Fantasy Anthology, which I found first (it’s organized alphabetically, kid, Jesus Christ) and decided to rent it solely because he wanted it. If I hadn’t been there on that day at that time, I never would’ve rented it and who knows how the timeline would’ve been affected.
I don’t know if I like FF5 the most because it was the first I spent any reasonable amount of time on or if it’s just because I like job systems (I also like 1 and to a lesser extent 3). But it has Faris who is probably the coolest FF character so that helps.
I had an affection for FFVIII when it came out mostly because the setting felt closer to present day than most RPGs (and every other FF game), so it had that novelty of being a game world that somewhat resembles our own. Also, it gave me like, Miracle Whip Starship Trooper vibes. I thought the school BBS was cool. I had a chip on my shoulder about card games for decades, so it wasn’t until a long time afterward that I even learned how to play the card game and actually bothered with it. I like the goofy system of being able to equip magic on your stats. Didn’t really like the characters, though, I guess moody Squall is still pretty relatable. I liked Rinoa’s blue dress and her eyebrows, and Selphie’s hair.
i think the perception was that team dragon quest was kowtowing to fan entitlement rage and that was a drag, more than, like, we had all been waiting eagerly for action rpg dragon quest. i’m not comforted or otherwise by games in a series being similar, i just don’t want fuckin “fans” to have a vote either way