What happened to Final Fantasy?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > What happened to Final Fantasy?

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

I think FFX is much more of what happened to the series than FF7 is. It's really the entry that defines the genre's aesthetic going forward and also solidified the tone that had been fairly inconsistent in the preceding titles.

Justin Godscock posted:

This is why I never got into it even though I was a colossal FF fan as a teenager. It threw up stone-walls in difficulty meaning you had to grind just to move on.

FFT's difficulty was goofy because it was so unbalanced. It's easy as hell if you know the good strategy: Put Basic Skill on everyone and spam Accumulate for a boatload of free XP/JP, roll monks with high Brave and pump that to permanent 97 with a mediator, rush Two Swords, and then spend the rest of the game one-shotting everything.

It's much harder if you actually grind it because then all of your martial job guys wind up as geomancers which are worthless, or lancers that have a bad job skill and bad weapon choices, and all of your casters are either squishy summoners that are out of mana after 2 spells, or time mages that do no damage. God help you if you grind it all out and wind up as a dancer or bard.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Nov 16, 2016

# ¿ Nov 16, 2016 04:38

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:11

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Awesome Welles posted:

Yeah, this is a good point. tbh, I was never too big on the anime realdoll look of some of the recent entries.

I meant to say the series' aesthetic, oops.

I don't just mean the character designs, but also the world design, which moved away from the relatively down-to-earth styles of FF6-FF8, which mixed modern themes and heavy industry with a high-fantasy world, and FF9's Victorian influences. Apparently they only kept things simple on PS1 because they had to, thanks to technical limitations. Once those started evaporating, they started making a point of throwing obscene amounts of decorative detail at practically everything, and it quickly turned into the series that gave us this:

... and this:

Now it's really easy to tell that you're looking at a Final Fantasy title because everything looks like it was stolen out of some monarch's private collection and all of the monsters are wearing chandeliers.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Nov 16, 2016

# ¿ Nov 16, 2016 05:24

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

MoaM posted:

Plus, turn-based RPGs can only be innovated so many times

I don't think that it's actually true. Look at something like Valkyrie Profile 2 if you want an example of how far its conventions can be stretched and still work.

The weird irony is that main-series FF was actually one of the least innovative of the formula, even compared to other RPGs that Square had worked on. Super Mario RPG added timing gimmicks to every attack, Chrono Trigger added positional elements to target selection, and later entries didn't do any of that. By FFX they had removed the active time portion of it too.

I guess there was probably a clearer path forward in just steering the whole thing towards Kingdom Hearts than there was in trying to figure out a way to make command-based combat stay interesting.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2016 06:11

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Also just to give an answer to "what happened?" in a different sense of the question, a big thing that happened was that JRPGs spent the late 90s being the pinnacle of production quality by a large margin, which waned over the 2000's as games like God of War and COD4 came out. So, it's lost a lot of its prestige since it's no longer the gatekeeper of the genre that's pushing the envelope.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2016 06:46

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

guts and bolts posted:

It's especially poignant given how things do not just fix themselves at the end. Cloud didn't get Nibelheim back. Aerith wasn't miraculously resurrected. Tifa doesn't really have her romantic shining knight - probably. Barret's home is still hosed and Dyne is still dead. Wutai is still a tourist trap and Lucretia is still frozen in a crystal. Sephiroth's dead and disaster is averted, but instead of solving your problems by eliminating them, FF7 forces the characters to deal with their problems by seeking closure and coping with them instead.

This is a good take, but it's also distinct in how personal all of the losses hit the characters. FF6's apocalyptic midpoint was much broader by comparison.

I think that the degree that FF7 focused on its individual characters was its greatest strength, in stark contrast to the convoluted politics and mythology of the Ivalice setting for example.

guts and bolts posted:

Necron is loving stupid.

FF9 is the only game I can think of where I could tell someone who knows nothing about the game who the final boss is and it wouldn't spoil anything.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2016 22:35

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:11

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Jenner posted:

Seriously when is Cloud an interesting protagonist?

He spends the first half of the game going from being an apathetic edgelord to developing a sense of duty and purpose, which suddenly implodes when he finds out that he's a delusional impostor whose purpose was to kickstart doomsday, I thought that was pretty interesting.

guts and bolts posted:

Valkyrie Profile

I'd recommend VP2 over VP1. It smoothed out a lot of the rough edges from VP1 (like the extremely counter-intuitive story progression system) and drastically improved the combat.

Also Star Ocean 2 has ear-splittingly bad VO so test your tolerance to that before buying.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 06:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > What happened to Final Fantasy?