He starts out as a dark knight and then becomes a paladin. So, that’s pretty rare, that a main character changes jobs like that in a game. Also, his story is about confronting his dark side and he started out committing war crimes, if I remember correctly.
Just look at this shit
Huh. Sounds interesting. I should maybe play it a third time and see if it makes an impression.
(I genuinely don’t have an opinion on the game. For some reason it just bounces right off me, even though I’ve spent 40+ hours with it.)
I feel like it’s worth it for the first half or so of the game! It’s got cool ideas. They made a sequel and an interquel too. Don’t know how good those are, though
Anybody else feel like Final Fantasy games usually start out really strong and then take a bit of a dive?
While that is a huge character dev in FFIV’s story, there’s a lot of curveballs thrown around how you obtain all the crystals…the areas you travel to, sidestory beats, a few good environmental gimmicks (annoying as it is the Dark Elf Cave forcing metal armor equipped characters into a paralyze/hold status is awesome, I love that type of shit and enjoy managing it)
And it won’t help for me to mention there’s a second set of crystals!!! but if you liked Cecil’s growth, there’s a ton more emotional steps and reveals in the second half of the game, callbacks to those with you all the way, and especially…the now genre expected Grand JRPG Ending. I’d seriously recommend seeing the rest of it through sometime, any way possible.
FFIV pacing is way closer to the brightly defined, this-then-that chrono trigger plotting that everyone loves than FFVI, which can alternate being somber and then seemingly way out to lunch. VI takes itself way more seriously (except when it doesn’t), was the first non-Sakaguchi-directed game in the series, has systems and gear that are never excessively generous or empowering unlike many jRPGs, and tries to do all this on the SNES with a 3M cartridge. it has a few really pronounced individual moments (a disproportionate number of which involve Setzer, who is arguably the worst character in your party if you’re playing normally) but it has also has stretches of weird vapidity, like they didn’t quite understand how to make regular Final Fantasy filler work with the tone they’d established. it’s never been my favourite (though the script patches that keep the Woolseyisms while giving it more room to breathe help a lot), but like all of the Hiroyuki Ito games, it feels absolutely worthwhile in a way that old RPGs often aren’t. Also, most of the characters are written as being in their thirties, which is neat.
Ito is there primarily in battle and mechanics (the ATB man), I always attribute a lot more directorship to Kitase’s credit, depending on if you’re looking at the overall creatives, flow and delivery.
Much as I stan VI, how it dissolved character job/roles with magic and then VII further with Materia, world fitting and combo building they are, has never been appealing to me as chess piece characters (even if simpler) using their own subsets in battle.
And on that note I wish Chrono Cross had 50-75% of the characters done much thicker and a “creative battle system” that was less repetitive being so non-specialized.
that’s probably true but every Hiroyuki Ito director credit happens to signify “this game actually cares about its characters and understands how to be sentimental without being cheap or writing a plot that will only scan to grade schoolers” so I think there has to be something there
That’s tight. We need more of that
The dark ones or something, right? That must have been when I plonked the controller down with the fierceness of a hundred tigers lol
But you’re right, I should play it again and see it through. I once played the 3D remake for a bit and it was pretty awesome. I love the original style but maybe I’ll play that instead…
VI is really all over the place from a systems perspective, like, everyone can learn magic, great, except most of the time you’ll have a specific esper on someone for like a +2 strength boost and they wind up being able to half cast regen forever, OK, sure, the two weird brothers who you get at the very beginning of the game are incredibly overpowered and they can use all their class-specific physical damage abilities repeatedly, great, almost no one can wield swords for some reason, interesting choice…
it’s not very gratifying, it requires you to grind more than the game ever otherwise asks of you to really get much out of it
That you could further tweak-custom each character’s stat’s PUMPED HOW YOU WANT 'EM depending on the Esper equipped when they level, now that I liked. Hope I’m remembering that right.
Now giving everyone all magic, even Cyan, Sabin or Gau much as it can save your ass? Made encounters over time as you played, too loose. The freedom to mix it all at your disposal is hampered w/out enough visible strategy of attack types, again another good punishing area is The Fanatic’s Tower. Magic only, ain’t exactly easy unless you know what’s up.
It’s cool how Limit Breaks are in FFVI but as more of a low health random special…whatever they’re called.
*Apparently Desperation Attacks, aka (I’m lovin) Hidden Blitz
there were relatively few mainstream RPGs at that point which openly encouraged you to minmax basic stats before it became more common to treat those as like reference values for each character and focus the player-facing systems on ability customization instead… and tactics ogre did it much better.
but there is something about the impossibility of obsessing over which boosts each of your characters got at each levelup that is refreshingly anti-jRPG (unless you actually try to obsess over it and have a real bad time)
anyway I think FFVI is mostly interesting because the specific set of things it was trying not to do or to do differently to distinguish itself from prior titles is fascinating to think about in the context of 1994, how neither the tone nor the systems stuff really works for me but you also can’t level most jRPG critiques against it
it was also probably the only chunk of a few years in there that Japanese console RPGs were genuinely more interesting and experimental than what was going on elsewhere
otoh, they addressed a significant issue that is at the core of the series (and which it tried to address basically from FF3 onwards (dunno much about two tbh)), namely that just giving you the same set of FIGHT MAGIC ITEM RUN options will turn old after the second or third time.
6 serves up such a wacky batch of things to play with, that mastering them will basically make you grind by default. the issue sometimes is that you are so used to using a set of actions from another FF that you may end up restricting yourself to that boring old set you’ve already used for 40 hours already.
too fast, shit!
vi is the most kawazu of the snes games i guess
i want to play a snes final fantasy now, fuckin’ 'ell
I’ll probably not play IV in any form again until I go back and test coherently reading JP SFC. VI though, lots of bubbling on it this year.
@BLUE_BLACK_PURPLE the DS remake was much better than expected, whole lotta love that mostly added and barely subtracted anything. Fairly challenging too, involved; party management and abilities are actually expanded upon when compared with the original. Unless someone really wants to know the SNES classic magic, IV DS is great. Don’t know much about hiccups with the PC/Steam port.
I think this is the most important aesthetic in VI – it strains harder than anything else against its technical limitations; it’s pushing so hard for gravitas in a way nobody tried in those cartoony sprites and it gets close enough and works so hard at it that it’s impossible not to love.
It’d be much less impressive if it were a PSX game, if it were actually some redbook audio version of Dancing Mad or the opera scene
They were aiming to make masterclass in so many ways that it seems endpoint or apex for the platform/era, and that’s where VII as the WOW new beginning can also be cruder in retrospect, the goals were much more “spectacular”.
