Jump to content
DVDVR Message Board

Final Fantasy Omnibus


Chaos

Recommended Posts

A lot of people hated that the crystal grid was capped, but I thought it added a lot to the boss battles that you couldn't just OP your way past them.

Also, playing the FFX remaster now, and I swear most of the locations are just corridors. Which is, of course, ironic that it's so beloved while XIII got killed for being a bunch of corridors.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think at the time the biggest complaints were that there was "no world map," how irritating the main character was, and the fact that you couldn't skip through the no video cut scenes at all, not on the macro or micro since they were tied to the characters moving about. It made everyone long for the days where you could read dialogue in a half second and just skip to the next. Oh and all the mini-game based subquests to get ultimate weapons. I hate XII more for its lack of character development based subquests, but X is pretty bad in that regard too. You dodge lightning instead of developing your characters.

 

i like the sphere system a decent amount and the strategy in the battles was aces. The game is just such a chore to play.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The "crystarium" is capped, but after a while you gain the ability to level up anyone in any class...  which isnt that useful :P I like the leveling up in X, XII and XIII because it seems like you are almost always spending points instead of waiting to level up once and then waiting again. The ultimate weapons were indeed ridiculous in FFX... I don't mind admitting that I used gameshark for those :P

 

I might be in the minority but I love the battle system in FFX and its really fun near the end when battles get hard.. Why couldn't the whole game be like that? The side quests do get kind of boring in XII and XIII... I never thought about that but making them have more to do with the characters would definately help. As much as I enjoy a good RPG battle I'm getting a little tired of running around gran pulse which I'm told has well over 100 treasure... orbs to find.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Playing X for the first time and it makes no sense how everyone lost their minds at XIII not having an open world.

 

That was actually one of things I recalled people hating about X. In general though every new final Fantasy is the worst to some people until the next one.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A lot of people hated that the crystal grid was capped, but I thought it added a lot to the boss battles that you couldn't just OP your way past them.

 

I hate game mechanics like that because if I take the time to cap out the crystal grid, I should be allowed to OP my way past anything. 

 

Me being a megapowered badass with legendary weapons and epic magic is supposed to be the result of all of this time I've investing in their "gameplay."

 

Reminds me of the Emerald Weapon Aire Tam Storm bullshit from FFVII. 

 

Why in the hell am I investing all of this time and effort to get a Master Materia version of Knights of the Round (there were times during the breeding / racing process required to get a Gold Chocobo where I wanted to fucking scream) to trivialize some of my encounters when there is some fucking superboss out there designed specifically to counter my allegedly uncounterable attack?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pretty much. It's why Omega Weapon was designed to ignore level-scaling in VIII and be a nightmare in any challenge. Hell, the main reason I want an HD port of XII with the International version is Trial Mode, aka "Here's a mode where you can actually use the OP equipment you get in the main game from killing all THOSE super bosses."

Now if you want to bitch about a boss then Ozma is your guy. Open the battle up with Meteor AND Curse, AND that thing where actions autofill his AT gauge? Fuuuuuuuuck THAT!

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Been jumping around games, trying to cut down my backlog. Meanwhile I'm also rolling on Final Fantasy V Advance, in preparation for the Four Job Fiesta this summer.

I need to focus on one game at a time, dammit. Too many games, not enough time.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That was my point, EVA, and the question was rhetorical.  I hate "optional" superbosses because they never seem optional.   And there is nothing secret about the Weapons in FFVII.  Travel around enough and you will find them, or maybe they will find you at a time and place where you are unprepared to fight them..

 

If I take the extra time to do all of the dumb side quests it takes to be uberpowerful, then nothing should be able to beat me.  If the game developer wants to offer me a challenge, then don't offer ultimate combos and epic weapons that are supposed to trivialize any encounter. 

 

Force me to beat your boss within the framework of normal class progression.  Ultimate rewards are supposed to give ultimate benefits.  If they don't, they're not ultimate rewards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That was my point, EVA, and the question was rhetorical.  I hate "optional" superbosses because they never seem optional.   And there is nothing secret about the Weapons in FFVII.  Travel around enough and you will find them, or maybe they will find you at a time and place where you are unprepared to fight them..

 

If I take the extra time to do all of the dumb side quests it takes to be uberpowerful, then nothing should be able to beat me.  If the game developer wants to offer me a challenge, then don't offer ultimate combos and epic weapons that are supposed to trivialize any encounter. 

 

Force me to beat your boss within the framework of normal class progression.  Ultimate rewards are supposed to give ultimate benefits.  If they don't, they're not ultimate rewards.

 

So basically, don't let you attach Knights of the Rounds with Quad Materia.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

I beat the FFX remaster a few days back, and now I'm working on powering myself up for a run at the dark aeons and, maybe, Penance.

Of course, doing all the Monster Arena stuff is critical to that process, and, boy, is it annoying that there's no easy way to keep track of your progress collectiving fiends. There should be a way to do that from the menu without having to go all the way back to the Arena and then make little notes for yourself. What is this, 1989?

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
  • 5 weeks later...

The beginning race for the FFV Four Job Fiesta begins tomorrow morning, AND it was announced that Type-0 will be given the HD treatment and ported to the states on the PS4.  Sweet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Aw man, how have I never posted in THIS thread? I have thrown away YEARS of my life on this series.

Everyone else has already done this bit, and I'll be doing nothing but repeating shit other people already said, but it seems like the Big List Of What I Thought About Every Entry In The Series.

-I think it says it all about the original Final Fantasy was that this was the first NES game I remembered to have an entire book-length strategy guide, sold in stories, which was completely devoted to it and nothing else. Your average issue of Nintendo Power could (and did!) tell you how to get through the first half of Dragon Warrior or Zelda in a single six-page article, but Final Fantasy needed AN ENTIRE FUCKING BOOK to itself. Sure, like half of it is filler with lists of every single weapon, item, and spell in the game (and all the monsters) and what everything's stats are. But still, NOTHING else was that complicated back then.

Okay, it wasn't the first RPG of its type. The entire Ultima series had long ago beaten everyone else to that particular punch. But still, Ultima was a primarily PC-based game which never managed to port itself to consoles with perfect fidelity. Also, Ultima was definitely NOT meant for easily-confused little kids: remember how stupidly complicated all that phases-of-the-moon crap was? Not to mention its strange level-up system wherein all the monsters got stronger at the same pace you did(if not faster!), rendering the entire POINT of levelling up into something completely fuckin' useless.

Final Fantasy was nothing like that. It was simple. You fight monsters. Get money. Buy better shit. Get experience. Get (eveeeeeentually) stronger. That's it. Every kid could easily understand it. And yeah, it was basically a glorified version of Dragon Warrior, with a larger world and an entire party of four dudes to keep up with instead of just one hero. And, so what? This truly was next-gen shit. Like, all the negative statuses that you (or, mostly, the enemies) had to play with: poison, blind, stone, etc etc etc. To my knowledge, no other competing game at this time had nearly as much complexity as FF yet kept it simple enough for even young kids to easily understand. There are REASONS this game was such a stupidly huge best-seller back in the day.

Of course, there were downsides. Ya know how in most later games, you only have to go through like three or four battles without seeing something along the lines of "Cid has reached the next level!"? NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, BITCH. The grinding, ohhhhh the grinding? Such stupid amounts of grinding. By the same time your Dragon Warrior is fully levelled-up to go beat the DragonLord, your inevitable fighter-thief-whitemage-blackmage party in FF just might be ready to go kill Lich in the Earth Cave. MIGHT. Jesus CHRIST, there's so much damn grinding. And everything costs SO much! I seriously doubt you've got the money for that Silver Sword the first time you come rolling into Elfland, let alone two of 'em (at least!) like you'll probably eventually need.

And if you're using a party of all Mages, may God have mercy on your soul, because this game certainly won't. Every one of the magical spells is prohibitively expensive. You've gotta by 'em all, separately, for every single mage who wants to learn the spell. And then, once you take that badass mojo into the field? Better have a lotta Tents handy, because your gun runs out of bullets in a real damn hurry. "Yes, you spent 15 hours earning this Lit-3 spell... now you can only cast it twice before needing to rest, and of course you can't rest ANYWHERE in a dungeon!" AAAHHHHH FUCK YOU, SQUAREDICKRIGHTUPTHEPARTSOFMEWHICHAREMOSTSOFT! What the hell are we working under here, Forgotten Realms rules of "LOL, you forget the spell as soon as you cast it!"?! Good fuckin' luck with magic-based parties. I always found it more useful to just bring along one red mage (for healing those damn status attacks) with a team otherwise entirely consisting of physical combatants. Especially since the encounter rate is so high EVERYWHERE, there's no possible way that a mage party can so much as walk down a freakin' hallway without being forced to expend all its magic on the 57 enemies you have to kill between one set of stairs and the next.

THANKFULLY, some of the remake versions of the game fixed these problems. The Gameboy Advance being the best example; they changed the idiotic "three shots per level" bullshit to a simple Magic Points system like all the other games, which gives you SO much more leeway in planning your strategy. It also vastly speeds up how quickly you gain levels, making all that insane amount of grinding much shorter. And it also improves the merchant system; in the original game, you had truly no idea what the hell you were buying until you bought it and tried it out. "Hey awesome, I had to spend like 9999 Gold on this new sword, but it's gonna be worth it... HEY WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN, IT'S WORSE THAN WHAT I'VE ALREADY GOT?!" Also, mass-buying items like healing potions was a tedious chore, because you could only get one at a time and it took days and days to fully fill up your larder. But also thankfully, the remakes fixed that too. And also that insanely annoying thing where if you've ordered two heroes to attack one monster, and the first hit kills the monster, the second guy just flails away at thin air like a very-special-needs kid; in the remakes, it does the standard thing where the 2nd guy just hits something else instead.

There's plenty of other stuff I could bitch and moan about, like the developers not yet having stumbled upon the idea of "save points" in the dungeons, which in this game were already quite long and tough and maze-like. But really, as a kid, that was almost part of the appeal. I never made it terribly far in the game back then; I would start a new game, get to around Melmond or Crescent Lake, but back then I had a bad habit of running from too many battles so I'd inevitably be getting slaughtered by the tougher random encounters every time I entered a new area. So I'd quit the game in frustration, not play it forever, and then eventually go back to it... and start another new game. Ah, I was NOT a patient person. (Hell, still aren't.)

That's all my thoughts on FF1, so onto the next... uh... was that, like, eight or ten paragraphs already? I think it took me damn near an hour to write all that. Fudgebucket. I think I'll do some of the other games later, yeah, later.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess I might as well respond to these things already, though, I'd already clicked on a whole bunch of quotes to answer.

That's always the most frustrating part of any RPG: "For fuck's sake, why couldn't you be that strong when you were on my team?" Thank Jebus you didn't have to fight Auron in 10. He would've the final boss or something.

Oh gimme a hell yeah. What's even more annoying are those few times they tease you with MAYBE being able to use the full-powered character... but then you can't control him, or immediately lose them, or what-fucking-ever. Yeah, Sephiroth in Nibelheim, I'm talking to YOU! Same to you, General Leo in Thamasa, you useless chump!

Although actually the very worst I ever saw was in Castlevania III for the NES, of all damn things. Two of your possible three sidekicks, Grant and Alucard, had to be defeated as bosses first. (The third, the near-useless mage Sypha, had been turned into a statue or some damn thing and you had to beat a sledgehammer-wielding cyclops to free him/her. Makes perfect sense!) But they are SO much stronger as bosses, it ain't even funny. Grant was hurling daggers and axes all over the damn room as if he'd never heard of the concept "hey, do you have enough Hearts to keep throwing those forever?" And Alucard was even worse, the prime example of this whole trait. As a boss: he's invincible from the neck down, he can turn into completely-invincible bats and teleport wherever he wants, and he shoots these triple fireballs which are nearly impossible to dodge. As a playable character? He's totally vulnerable to every damn thing in the world, including while in bat form (which now eats Hearts like Mola Ram after a hunger strike!) and he shoots ONE fireball which is so wimpy that your enemies giggle whenever they see him coming. (Yeah, it can eventually be powered up to double and triple balls, but even a simultaneous triple-fireball is only as strong as a single one of Trevor's whip shots, and good luck hitting anything smaller than fuckin' Frankenstein with all three at the same time.)

I guess the overall storylines of 7 and 8 didn't bother me. What did bother me is that almost all characters interaction is centered around two fuckers who don't even like people. So, why the fuck is he is the leader? "Hey Cloud, what should we do next?" "Fuck if I know." "Hey, I think we should do this!" "...." Most of the two games' conversations are built around the leaders being verbally abusive or just shitty towards the people and most of the other people just take it.

 

 

I guess that was a much welcome and needed change in 9. Zidane wasn't the strongest or smartest, but it was pretty damn clear why he was the leader of the pack.

You just described exactly why I've never liked Snake Plissken in the Escape From... movies. Uh, dude, do you HAVE to be SUCH a giant asshole to EVERYONE you meet, including your closest friends and allies who are all constantly risking their lives for you? Just cuz you're the strongest fighter doesn't mean you've got the right to constantly be taking big ol' watery shits right in the mouths of all your party members.

Although, I think the reason Zidane was the leader was mostly due to the incompetence of all the other characters. Vivi and Quina are are children, Dagger and Eiko might as well have been too, and Steiner is a total idiot. Freya and Amaranth are the only others who exhibit any sort of maturity, or at least they do in between Freya's emo breakdowns and Amaranth just staring coldly at everyone while occasionally muttering "meh".

The decline in popularity of Squeenix properties in recent years can be directly connected to a lack of blitzball. No one, and I mean NO ONE, would be shitting on either XII OR XIII if they had blitzball.

Oh, people would still shit on them. But MUCH LESS. Drownball is awesome~! I'm sure that I've easily spent more time playing it than on actual FFX gameplay. (And I like most FFX gameplay.)

Playing X for the first time and it makes no sense how everyone lost their minds at XIII not having an open world.

X is practically VI's World Of Ruin compared to the super-linearity of the first half of XIII. The more recent game LITERALLY has you running in one straight line, with no deviations, for the majority of the game. At least X had the decency to throw in various towns and dungeons and little side-quests, just to liven things up. That's a game which actually knows what a "maze" is, unlike XIII which keeps things so bottlenecked for so long that you're likely to contract agoraphobia once you finally get down onto the wide-open planet.

That was my point, EVA, and the question was rhetorical.  I hate "optional" superbosses because they never seem optional.   And there is nothing secret about the Weapons in FFVII.  Travel around enough and you will find them, or maybe they will find you at a time and place where you are unprepared to fight them..

 

If I take the extra time to do all of the dumb side quests it takes to be uberpowerful, then nothing should be able to beat me.  If the game developer wants to offer me a challenge, then don't offer ultimate combos and epic weapons that are supposed to trivialize any encounter. 

 

Force me to beat your boss within the framework of normal class progression.  Ultimate rewards are supposed to give ultimate benefits.  If they don't, they're not ultimate rewards.

I think they just don't like including anything which is a TOTAL gamebreaker in EVERY circumstance. (At least intentionally, stuff like Vanish-Doom in VI doesn't count.) Sometimes they just wanna make you sweat. I don't always agree with that, but I can see the point of making sure to include at least one or two fights which will always be damn near impossible.

As for the Weapons in VII: they're not hard to find, but they're not hard to avoid either. The red one doesn't move at all, and the green one stays underwater (where there's only two other things to find anyway, the key and the plane, so you won't spend much time down there). The only one you're likely to bump into is the flying black one, and he's by far the weakest one. No matter how weak you are, if you're at the point in the game where you can actually encounter him, you should be able to run him off (remember, like Doom Gaze in VI, he only takes a certain amount of punishment before flying away like a big scared baby).

And now imagine someone in Japan in 1987 declaring Final Fantasy I the worst ever because it ain't no Dragon Quest.

Too bad that Dragon Quest was overrated junk until around IV.
Oh, hush that silliness, DFA. Dragon Warriors 1-3 were all a lot of fun on the SNES. No, they weren't as complex or polished as the later games, but they were damn fun stuff for the time period when they came out. Heck, sometimes I'll still play 1 to this day. (With the monotonous sound WAY down, admittedly.) And yeah, even at the time I remember some kids whining "Dragon Whatever is better than this new shite, Final Fantasy!"

And hey, finally: does anyone know any decent podcasts which cover FF and Square in general? And I do NOT mean casts like the ones at Final Fantasy Union, where all they ever seem to cover is obsessively speculating over scraps of news about the latest upcoming releases. I mean something that thoroughly, exhaustively covers the older games too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Back on track:

-motherfuck Final Fantasy II right in its motherfucking eye AND ear holes. Maybe the nostrils, too. ONE time I tried to play this game. ONCE. It clearly didn't have a single bit of graphic or battle system upgrade since the first game, it was the exact same engine in every respect. Once I finally emulated the damn thing, I pick my team, equip them, set out from town... and then get SLAUGHTERED in my very first random battle. I mean, fucking ANNIHILATED. It wasn't even close. You couldn't even SEE "close" from my ground-eye-view of dead heroes. These guys treated me like Sly Stallone treating a bamboo hut full of Asian soldiers. As if my heroes were foam-weaponed LARPers attempting to fight a for-real version of the mighty Uruk-Hai. We never had a CHANCE, and I immediately turned the game off in disgust. (That's a dealbreaker for me in anything but a straight-up action game, if I instantly get killed right away in the first level.) Then I looked up some info online about the game, discovered the sadistic joke of a "level-up" system, and then pretty much right then and there I swore an oath to God Almighty that I would never play this game again.

-FFIII: uh, I think I've tried to play this one... sometime... surely? I don't remember anything about it, except it kinda felt like a beta test run for the stuff they'd eventually perfect on the Super Nintendo. I think this was the first time they messed around with genuine dialogue rather than just one-sided "conversations" that all fit inside a single speech bubble. Aside from that, I'll have to get back to you later.

-FFIV: ...

...or as I knew it back in the day, "Final Fantasy 2"...

...okay, full disclosure, I'm still playing this game. Like, right now. In the other window. I've got an emulator of the GBA version open. I just exited the secret back door of the Dwarf castle, and am on my way to the underground half of the Tower Of Bab-el.

Here I run the risk of overselling a game just because of how much history I've got with it, how much I've loved it for how long. But truly, this was the game which made me into a lifelong JRPG fan. It was certainly the first 16-bit RPG I played, and I was freakin' astonished at how much the genre had evolved since the previous installment (for all I knew at the time, this really WAS Final Fantasy TWO).

Sure, there are problems. Bad translations ("You spoony bard!"). A super-linear plotline, with practically nothing for sidequests until you got the airship. A lead villain whom you barely ever get to fight, with it turning out that basically "the devil was mind-controlling everyone" was the real story. All kinds of shit like that. A "loyal sidekick" who made Betraying You into his full-time job, but you still kept taking him back anyway. And of course, the most infamous complaint of all: that levelling up the vast majority of the characters is pointless, since you lose them all at some point during the game (even if some of 'em do come back later, it's with different higher levels anyway).

All true. All annoying. ALL THINGS I DON'T GIVE ONE SHIT ABOUT. I DON'T FUCKING CARE, I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS GAME. LOVE IT LIKE WRESTLEMANIA X-7. LOVE IT LIKE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE. LOVE IT LIKE A STEAMING BOWL OF CREAMY MAC & CHEESE. LOVE IT LIKE A SMOKING BOWL OF GREENEST WEED. LOVE IT LIKE A NAKED REDHEAD IN MY BED. LOVEITLOVEITLOVEITLOVEIT!!!

This was the first time I'd ever seen an RPG that actually had a story, man. Some earlier games had fucked around with things like that; NES titles as random as Bionic Commando or Deja Vu all come to mind. But it was never like THIS, which a full ensemble of characters who all got their own arcs. And some of them were freaking KILLED! Your heroes could get killed and then stay dead forever!!! Okay, it finally turned out that only Tellah never made a miraculous recovery, but still! In that stretch between Rydia being eaten by Leviathan and Cid suicide-bombing the volcano, it felt like I was playing the video game equivalent of Schindler's List, there were so many tear-jerking "deaths". And even though the final main-character deaths were pretty negligible, there were a SHITLOAD of innocent/heroic NPCs who brutally bit the dust in the most horrifying ways. At the time, this kind of stuff was unprecedented. We even had inter-party angst: the characters argued, turned on each other, made back up again, got into love triangles and unrequited crushes on each other, all kinds of Marvel Comics shit which video games just hadn't done before this point.

And then there's the gorgeous graphics, and the beyond-gorgeous music, and the incredible variety of different settings, and the incredible variety of different hero powers, AND the incredible variety of different enemies. And did anyone else notice that the enemies' artwork actually got scarier as the game went on? Early bosses like the Mist Dragon and Octomamm were fairly intimidating, but when screen-tall guys like Golbez or Rubicant finally show up... "...game over, man, game over!" was my first instinctive reaction. And that's not even getting into the downright satanic Pandora's Box of just plain wrong monsters you meet deep underneath the moon, climaxing with Zeromus himself being basically like Cthulhu except his tentacles have mostly rotted off. DUDE! "You know, for kids!" (I remember me and my brother both chanting "Die Zeromus die Zeromus die Zeromus DIE~!" when I finally managed to beat him for the first time, and he had that epic dragged-by-thunderstorms-into-hell death sequence.)

In fact, this might be my favorite group of villains out of any Final Fantasy game (with the possible exception of part X, which we'll get to muuuuch later). Yeah, Kefka and Sephiroth are cool and everything, but... they were likable in some ways. Kefka was funny and human and vulnerable, even when he'd apparently become The One. Sephiroth was tortured and tragic and sexy. But, Golbez/Zeromus? Uh, no. NOTHING redeeming about those fuckers (before Golbez finally woke up for real, anyway). No humor. No weakness. They were fucking MONSTERS and they loved being such. Even if you managed to kick Golbez's ass, he'd just transform into a damn creepy crawling hand and steal your precious treasure anyway. And then there were the Elemental Fiends, who actually had real personalities for once (except for the air chick, who never really said much besides "HAH I AM A TORNADO NOW" or whatever). Even random jabronis like Dr. Lugae got backstories and character mini-arcs and memorable dialogue. ("OUCH! Not me! THEM, over THERE!")

...okay, I've convinced myself that my time now is better spent returning to PLAY this game instead of just talking about it here. This is Jingus, last survivor of the Lunar Whale, signing off. "One to be born, from a dragon..."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That, that's a lot of words.

That, that's my gimmick, brutha.

I was gonna post some more here in my intermittent series countdown, but 1.I remember practically nothing about FF5, and 2.upon replaying the beginning of FF6 here recently, I realized that I'm TOO familiar with the game. I've played it so many times, for so many hours, sniffing out EVERY hidden secret ("what, you guys DIDN'T know about the tiny hidden room in the cave after South Figaro when you're trying to find Sabin and Vargas, the tiny hidden room with an early-game Atlas Armlet in it?") over the long years, that hardly any of it feels special anymore. I can directly quote SO much of the dialogue that the words hardly mean anything anymore, it's just like some kind of Rocky Horror Midnight Show call-and-response game for me. I gotta think a little while about what I wanna say about this entry. (And probably try to play at least a little bit of 5 sometime.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I eventually want to go back and do a series play through/replay. I own 5&6 from the Anthology set, and I need to pick up Chronicles and Origin.

 

The only one I think I'd have trouble getting my hands on is 3, and that's because i have zero desire to own a DS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...