The Great Final Fantasy Retrospective - Let's Mosey
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My rankings on all them except the MMOs and 13 and 15.So almost all of them basically?
Frankly, it makes no sense to include getting evey item as part of 100% in games that aren't about collecting items. In a collectathon like Banjo-Kazooie, yeah sure, if you don't have all the trinkets the game isn't 100% done.That's the challenge the game presents. In a game like Final Fantasy or Dark Souls the game is about the combat. If you've beaten every challenge the game offers you that's 100% complete because running around in circles waiting for items with a .001% chance of dropping doesn't test anything but your willingness to waste your own time and your luck with RNG.
My favorite FF game is probably 9. I just love how much it is a throwback to the older games, and goes out of its way to have a main character that doesn't brood, but at the same time, the story has some heavy moments to it.
Zodiac Spear, FF XII. If you know...you know. If not, allow me to educate you. Keep in mind, this is only true for the original version. They removed the sidequest for the Zodiac versions.
In the original version of the game, there were two ways to obtain the spear. One of them was a chest in a late game location. However, it would only be in that chest if the player didn't open any of 4 specific treasure chests early on in the game. If the player opened any of those chests, the spear would no longer be in that chest. There is, however, a second way to get the spear...
You unlock a dig site by acquiring 10 Espers and completing the Mindflayer Hunt, then speak to a certain NPC to unlock the Henne Mines Phase 2 Dig. There, you can get the spear in a chest in a secluded area...maybe.
Why the "maybe"? The chest has a 10% chance to spawn. If it spawns, there is a 10% chance that the spear is in the chest, making it a 0.001% chance that the Spear will actually be obtainable on a given run. Oh, and you must be wearing a Diamond Armlet on your lead character to get the spear.
In the Zodiac version, they kind of fix this by no longer having a guaranteed way to obtain the Spear, so you don't have to worry about opening the Forbidden Chests. They drop the spawn rate of the other Spear chest to 1%, but if the chest spawns, it's guaranteed to have the Spear in it. You can also buy the Spear from a certain vendor if you meet the right (grindy) conditions.
IX has a great moment where Zidane finds out the truth about his backstory and goes into a deep existentialist funk, decides to go off on take on the big bad himself in a seemingly suicidal gesture. And trying to fight the mobs is very difficult solo, but as you go on, each one of the other party members shows up one by one and says he's not doing this alone and they'll fight with him until he finally snaps out of it and accepts their help. And as this is going on, because you're getting more and more help, the battles against the same enemies are getting progressively easier as you go. And I don't know why but that scene is one of the most memorable in the entire game for me.
Spoilers 9 isn't one of my favs. Shhhh don't tell anyone.
Speaking of not one of my favs.....Let's talk about Final Fantasy tw.....ugh...sorry I threw up in my mouth a little...Final Fantasy 2 then.
The second game in this incredible series makes me wonder how they decided to keep going with the series because FF2 is a game experiment in which nothing works. Namely the progression system, but let's not talk about that quite yet. Instead let's talk about the story, because FF2 is were they make their first real attempt at a story in the series.
Like the first game you play as four hapless youths, just living your best lives, for like five seconds then your home is invaded, you flee, and you die. Well you don't die, but the first battle in FF2 is unwinable and you are all knocked the fuck out, your family is murdered, and so you do what most youths would do in that situation, find another place to refugee and become bread makers.....errr I mean you join a rebellion and try to take back your kingdom.
These days the plot is pretty on the nose tropey, but for a game made in the late 80's I don't really hold that against the story. And in fact FF2 tries some really interesting things with the story. One thing I actually do like is that occasionally while talking to people, phrases in their dialog will be a different color and you can actually memorize these "key words" to bring up in conversations with other NPC's which might tell you were to go next or just flush out the world a bit more, or you will baffle the NPC and they'll look at your with a "?". This is an interesting concept because it sort of motivates the player to pay attention and be invested in the story. So when you are looking for an airship, you can use the airship keyword to find the man that will become a series staple going forward CID.
Speaking of staples a few more staples come into play in FF2 that will appear regularly going forward if not every single game. Like Chocobos. Chocobos make their first appearance here and they are pointless. You can ride around on a chocobo on the world map and they will let you traverse without random encounters, unfortunately you can only get a chocobo from the chocobo forrest of which there is only one....and it's out of the way....and basically it makes getting the bird a bigger waste of time than just going to where ever you are going in the first place random encounters be damned. Also the song is only 4 measures long and it annoying as fuck.
Annoying is a big key word in this game, because that's kind of the best way to describe FF2. It's annoying to play. From the way the storry plays out which basically rotates your fourth party member constantly with guest characters for much of the game. To the progression system with combat. Everything in this game levels up independantly. Every stat, every magic, every passive thing, levels on it's own via a strange system that sometimes doesn't give you credit for anything.
The most famous example of this is how you level your character's HP. In order to level HP you have to take damage in battle, which is no big deal right? Monsters are going to hit you back so you are naturally going to take damage. Here's the problem, if you heal that damage before the fight ends, you don't get any credit towards your HP level. Which means you have to get hurt, STAY hurt, and then heal outside the battle. This also applies to agility and defense stats, on top of weapon skills. Every weapon type is a different level up system. Use swords to buff your sword level, daggers for daggers, and on and on the list goes.
And the kicker to all of this......the monsters do not give you increasing xp towards anything. Meaning you gain just as much xp towards a skill or stat by fighting the weakest shit in the game as you would fighting in the final dungeon. You know what this means?
Grind your ass off fighting weak rats or whatever in literally the first zone of the game, overpowering yourself to stupidity, and then steam roll the rest of the game. The system is just bad because it doesn't encourage expiramantation. Hell don't even equip weapons and just have all your characters master using their bare fists to fuck shit up. There is no point in buying new equipment because you'd just have to grind the levels of the equip up for every character.
On paper the leveling system is interesting and makes sense. But the way they've implimented it, and how the system can fight you in some ways (like with the HP levels) makes it utterly disasterous to play. Which is a shame because FF2 would be a totally servicable old school RPG otherwise, it's story is ok, and the journey is stil colorful and interesting. Everything about this game is held back by the combat system, and that alone is why it's the most skipable game in the series and usually ranks top place in the "Worst FF games" lists.
To be honest I spent about 6 hours grinding at the start of the game, and then sped through the game as fast as I could from there. And what's crazy is that 95% of the enemies couldn't touch me, I barely needed healing at all and typically only struggled if I got wacked by a status effect of some kind. Otherwise, it was smooth sailing.
EDIT: Playtime 10hrs. Character levels....No fucking clue.
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At least you got further than me. I could barely get past the first hour before quitting back in high school I don't know how some of my friends got through playing FF II without going nuts.
Possibly Stockholm syndrome. I say that as someone who beat it
This is why I said 4 is when the series really starts. 1-3 are more relics, good for viewing in a museum as curiosities within a controlled environment but not much good for their original purpose, much like a 1000 year old urn.
Keep in mind, we all played the GBA versions of FFI & FFII. At least the GBA version of FFI revamped the combat further and was a port of the PSX version. The same with FF II, but not much was revamped and barely killed the grind. And I mean barely. Plus, FFI had those cool optional bonus dungeons where you could fight bosses from different FF games. You are right about their original versions being museum relics from the past. The modern ports, depending on the version, mitigate or improves most of the time. The exception is always FFII.
I know one of them played through the game just to brag he beat FFII once, and would never play the cursed title ever again. Yeah, I am sure it was worth the ego boost.
The pixel remaster does not have the extra content available in other versions. For the most part I believe these pixel remakes are kind of just true to the OG versions of the games as much as possible. So I didn't have the extra dungeons and such.....unless I missed them.
I never played the pixel remasters, and if what you say is true, then it is more likely the case. From what I heard, there is not much or no bonus content of the GBA versions. A serious crime and laziness on SE's part.
A keyword system that ends up being completely pointless since it's hardly used and everybody that you can use keywords on only ever responds to at most 2 of the keywords you can get. Could've just had the NPCs say the dialog without player input and it would've worked just as well and would've probably been easier for the developers besides.
It's an attempt at realism where it shouldn't exist. What's worse is you just end up beating up your own characters in battles against weak monsters that can't hurt you for several hours. The way Elder Scrolls does it is only marginally better and is vastly improved by modding in a standard leveling system but sadly FF2 can't have that.
The combat system definitely is what ruins the game. FF12 and FF8 also have terrible combat mechanics but FF2's takes the cake.
Mm. This is beginning to be a problem with remakes, new content not being brought over into newer remakes. Like how additional content in the 3DS remakes of DQ5 and DQ8 weren't brought over in their latest releases.
I think Critical is just appreciating that they tried something a bit different, even if it's primitive for its time.
Final Fantasy II / YMMV - TV Tropes
Alternative Character Interpretation: Here. Anticlimax Boss: Borghen, the foul arch-traitor who assisted the Empire in taking the heroes' hometown and thereby resulting in the deaths of their parents, turns out to be the weakest boss in the game …
tvtropes.org
I actually didn't like that scene that much (and I love FF9) cause it was just such an abrupt shift in personality for Zidane and then was fixed so quickly anyway (in game time it last maybe 15 minutes). Maybe I'd like it more if they spent more time on this or if Zidane was shown as deriving is positive attitude because he though he would find some wonderful story behind his origin. But Zidane was shown to not really care about his origin, he even has a great scene where he explain how he managed to get in the thief group and that they were his real family despite not having a biological one. But then he find out about his origin, says "actually everything is worthless" and 2 second later goes "wait its all worthwhile actually".
FF2 spawned the saga "franchise" (including final fantasy legend on GB) and I just don't get how it got this far. It seems like the entire design philosophy behind it was to make everything as obtuse and pointless as possible and it all started with 2. I can understand the idea behind moving away from leveling up, but 2 second of playtesting should have made it obvious leveling individual stats is an awful system. Maybe they wanted to stretch the game with pointless grinding?
Its a shame cause 2 story is actually pretty cool (as far as the overarching plot) and a remake (or something like stranger of paradise) would be pretty nice if they buffed out all the dumb system and focus on the cool stuff. The game also started a tons of iconic stuff, even dragoon started here. And its just.... not worth playing.
I've only seen a little bit of the start of FF9 but one thing that stuck out to me is how weird it is for Vivi's backstory to happen so soon. Usually I'd expect a mysterious character like that to be left a mystery for a while so the player could muse over them but they just go right in on it. It was interesting.
Oh I 100% played the NES Final Fantasy 1 (I got the "new" nintendo when I was 3. The fact that it came with Zelda 2 and Mario 3 probably would've tipped me off if I'd been a year or two older). But yeah, I rented FF1 from the local video store. I was amazed at how far they came in a like, less then a year when my cousin had FF2 (Cause of the american naming) on his SNES.
Actual #2 I sort of barely played on a secondhand copy of one of the playstation collections years later (on a PS2). I was more into the package for Chrono Trigger, but figured I was obligated to entertain the other games lol. (that version of Chrono Trigger sadly was sadlled with insane loading times so I ended up seeking out an emulator anyways)