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I really like Final Fantasy games!
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Nov 16, 2016 16:25
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:51 |
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Final Fantasy V is probably the best on a sheer mechanical level.
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Nov 16, 2016 16:41
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Straight White Shark posted:FF6's World of Ruin was actually really good and is the main reason the game stands up at all today. It manages to take one of FF6's biggest weaknesses (sloppy mechanics) and turn it into a strength of sorts. Mechanically tighter games often struggle to incorporate open ended gameplay. If you're relying on finely tuned encounters to sell your game, letting players tackle areas in different orders and at varying levels of power and access to different abilities is a nonstarter--your only option is to preserve any type of balance is to use level scaling, which everyone hates and is still unlikely to match the quality of well designed set pieces. FF6 "solves" this problem by not having good mechanics in the first place. The balance is so fast and loose it doesn't matter all that much which order you tackle things in. The boring mechanics are redeemed, in turn, by the excellent exploration aspects of the WoR. You miss out on exploring interesting combat mechanics but instead of discovering cool job combos or whatnot you get to discover entire new characters, dungeons, and subplots. It's really true, and FFVI manages to nail that magic moment in every FF game, where the game world opens up to you, in a way no other title in the franchise has quite managed. I wouldn't call FFVI's mechanics boring per se, I really liked that the first half of the game has you relying on individual character strengths and weaknesses and then when the game world finally opens up, you get the freedom to really build your team however you want, after a few trials. But the moment where the World of Ruin is yours to explore and you have an airship and there's ten thousand things you can do and all of them are useful, be it tracking down a new piece of magicite or recruiting another party member or getting an ultimate weapon...that's just a loving exhilirating moment, and the series has never quite managed to capture that sensation. Actually, maybe, a little bit, with FFXIV. I think the one truth anyone can say about any Final Fantasy game is that they have the best soundtracks of all time. Especially in the PSX era, I don't think Uemetsu has or ever will top the sheer variety, energy and charm of the music in FFIX.
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Nov 16, 2016 18:31
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World of Final Fantasy is actually very good, no matter which FF is your
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Nov 17, 2016 06:46
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The thing is, Final Fantasy games CAN have decent writing. World of Final Fantasy is really funny and on-point. FFIX has a great script and it has a lot of consistent themes that aren't blatantly in your face, something FFX can suffer from. Square's gotten a lot better than the dark Dirge of Cerberus days, both in and out of the Final Fantasy brand. Bravely Default has funny dialogue and I'd say that the games tend to have far better voice acting performances than they ever have; FFX has some truly awkward scenes, whereas later games, even FFXIII-II, have scenes where you can tell the voice actors have a lot of fun with it. With FFXIV knocking it out of the park in the storytelling department, I really have a strong hope that they have realized that strong characters and cohesive storytelling are what people want. FFXIII started out obtuse and then became so esoteric it's not even...it doesn't even begin to make sense. The entire opening monolog in FFXIII-3 is just awful, because the story is forced to tell, rather than show, everything about its setting because everything in the game is so distant and unrelated to the previous entries that the story would make even less sense if they didn't sum it up. Those games are told in confusing, non-linear, in-medias-res styles and it's really annoying and dumb and adds nothing. It denotes a lack of discipline or skill in the writing staff or else a director with far too much editorial power. There are talented people at Square-Enix, and they're clearly capable of producing a genuinely good product. They've been orbiting a genuine incline in quality for a few years now. That's what worries me about FFXV, though. It's this big stinking anchor left over from this terrible decade-long span of the company where they decided spin-offs, 7-year development cycles, cheap cash-in sequels and games with little gameplay and stories that nobody could give a poo poo about. My concern is that FFXV will have all the wrong baggage, and a game that really needs to be a smash hit for Square will be a sort of tepid flop. Conan's bit on the game is honestly a really bad advert for the game, because the casual audiences who may have been vaguely curious about the game who watch Conan now have a really strong negative impression to a game that Square is clearly trying to market to mass audiences. Obviously Square wants this to bring in Call of Duty numbers but with the brand sullied as it is, and the nostalgia crowd long since checked out, this game needs to be something that a lot of people like, and when you get reports such as "you need to watch the supplemental movie to understand the plot" it really starts to worry me that the talented, good writers at SE are either stuck in localization wings or glued to smaller outlier projects, and the company's "main talent" have remained the same cadre of lunatics who thought Dirge of Cerberus was a good idea. I really want FFXV to be a good product, but as somebody who really likes Final Fantasy games and who wants to see the franchise continue to produce high-budget, graphically-impressive, genre-defining role playing games, I also want it to sell well, and I fear that if it's even a lukewarm success, it will probably spell a huge loss for the company, given how loving hard they have been pushing the marketing.
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Nov 18, 2016 04:43
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Plus, 13 has combat that's largely meaningless. In the first chunk of the game you have a limit to how much you can level up and you level up pretty much every three fights. The sphere grid knock-off is a joke, because it offers no branching paths or any actual choices and literally just makes it take longer to get your stat increases. loving Pokemon has a better level up system than FFXIII. FFX-2, combat mechanics as a positive or no, has combat that actively fuels another element of gameplay, the job system, which rewards players with new skills, better stats, and all that jazz to the jobs they are using. Every job needs to be leveled up as well, so this means that even if you have to backtrack or explore an earlier zone, you can swap in a low-level job and still benefit from the experience while the battles are rendered piss easy by your other, stronger jobs. Like, all that stuff is good. FFX-2 is the inverse 13 in that the gameplay is solid but the stuff that surrounds, bridges and propells that gameplay is loving awful.
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Nov 22, 2016 15:40
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:51 |
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exquisite tea posted:This, except the story, characters, and hell just about everything in FFX-2 own also. I don't appreciate brainy Rikku taking a massive drop in IQ and being a ditzy bimbo who laughs while her semi-retarded brother propositions his cousin. All of FFX's characters kind of go to poo poo in FFX-2. The only character who doesn't suffer is Yuna, whom it is interesting to see in a new capacity, but good lord, a pop singing gunslinger isn't exactly how I envisioned Grand Summoner Yuna to go.
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Nov 24, 2016 17:31
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