I raise you:
as a friend pointed out, FF6 may in some ways be more relatable than any other title because you fail to save the world, but must endure and keep on going, anyway.
6 is my personal favorite, because it showed me what jrpgs were capable of being in 1994. it exceeded any other gameplay experience i’d had, at the time, and i still think not having one main character is a lesson most jrpgs
have never managed to fully comprehend.
Ah Final Fantasy’s 1st Favorite Octopus.
FFVI is more “important” and worth half the time it would take to do P4 (however era slow it can get would still be much faster than a Persona game). I could try and shuffle the deck 100 times then cut it stacked for P4 - and it would still lose. I say this having sacrificed nearly all of December 2008 to it and saying it was better than P3 for a couple years, then replaying that and getting smacked with gravity. 4’s a good game but the appeal is large swathes generational nostalgia to teen/young adult feels and fan pleasing, the scoobydoodom is true, the identity politics have their upswings but arguably implode at times, thin gravy.
Two huge influence cores of FF7 are the Xenogears pitch, then next to or after that - trying to pick up the pieces after The Achievement That Is FF6. It’s Uematsu’s favorite score (he tries to avoid saying so but told me so with a grin and 
) and that being such a huge part of FF’s legacy in general, you throw in the rest of key staff trying to take everything they learned from 1-5 and. It’s just the least questionable game to play for jrpg enthusiasts imo (as in, is it really that great?) cuz chhhyeah the better crafted statue lying in FF7 and 32-bit onwards’ shadow.
Was reflecting more on P4 with the soundtrack and a synopsis - yeah it’s got a lot to love and can strike some serious chords but I might’ve ended up a bit biased, in this moodmode for too long.
When 5 wasn’t even an image of ball and chained chairs.
tonight i discovered with @la_ciel that you can set players 1 and 2 to control different party members in FF6 and the chaotic energy of that almost justifies ATB to me as a design decision, like some horrifying co-op hot potato. was worth the hours it took to set up netplay for the romhack imo
that spoiler is pretty real, yeah
ffvi is one of my favorite video games ever in the whole world
I mean I want to play through 6 at some point but I started it two or three times and the start was always killer. But I couldn’t get invested past that. I think I played it too close after 7, when that world was just everything FF was to me. Stupid, I know. And now that I think about it a lot of the criticism for FF7 when it came out was probably not really directed at the game but that it wasn’t FFVI. Similarly I might have felt that 6 just isn’t 7 and wrote it off too quickly.
Yeah, while it’s entirely possible to newly click into VI with love for it’s own presented merits as an experience, I can see how folks more versed or acclimated to rpgs that came after might need to apply some historical holding, frame of reference to get a feel for that pedestal.
Yes, certainly. It was another era. The pre-FFVII game I got into the most was FFIV. Something about its world immediately captured me and the twist with the main character seemed so novel. But then it turned into a checklist game and that took all the fun out of the adventure for me.
I don’t doubt that FFVI is potentially the actual king/queen of JRPGs
This thread convinced me to relisten to the FF6 soundtrack at work.
Good thread.
Wondering what you’re referring to in IV, like the paces and motions the story put you through after a certain point? Or the tasks, exploration, dungeons, etc?
Just curious. If things felt cliché, yeah in some of those ways it’s def a forerunner.
I have played most of Final Fantasy IV twice and I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about its story and characters except there’s an airship owned by a gambler named Seltzer maybe?
REAL EDIT: I really don’t remember FF4, because apparently Setzer is in Final Fantasy VI.
Yep, this is IV’s main airship engineer (and series first playable) Cid
He’s also got the badass feat of iirc kamikaze jumping off an airship with a bomb in hand to help the crew escape, later showing up in the dwarf castle bedded up like “YO”
Yeah, the story. Specifically that you have to find 8 or so orbs or crystals. That’s the checklist. It doesn’t matter how good the individual story beats are while getting those things, the fact that I know what I’ll be doing for the next dozen hours or whatever just deflates the whole thing. It becomes predictable. I’ll get an orb and then I’ll get another orb and so on. Maybe if they’re creative I’ll get two orbs at once at some point. Maybe the villain will steal all of them when you’re trying to get the last one or have all of them.
I like not knowing what a game will throw at me next! I want to be surprised. I mean, this was a FF trope from the get go but I just never liked that sort of “quest.”
How could you forget Cecil and his transformation?? Come on, you gotta remember that at least, that was so cool.
I have no memory of this, but it does seem to me that Cecil probably wore blue armor.