Final Fantasy

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Originally Posted by gglol

Yeah but the enemies and bosses are still too weak even with barely no grinding. This patch fixes all that. Making enemies and bosses much more powerful and more hp, aswell as all party members hp and stats reduced by 50%. Many more things have been nerfed to make the game more balanced.

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Our conceits of grinding are oceans apart. FF7 always struck me as painfully grind-heavy, whereas PSII is the rpg I'd cite as the paragon of grind-free gaming. That has something to do with the battle system though, particularly the limit breaks: take hits to become more powerful, hmm...Were it parry/dodge/dispel hits that would make sense, but as it stands it's no good. Put it this way: my first, greedy, digressive, loving and disappointed playthrough I found it a cakewalk, but that was because I ransacked the game. The twice I've gone back and played the story to completion I've found it challenging, of course because I played it cursorily--thoroughly at the beginning, which is the best part, then with increasing haste as the game went on. Which leads to the query whether these hacks are selective? Eg the marsh python was ludicrously weak but many of the creature's in the final cave were quite stout. And of course the Weapons are very powerful, tediously so. If all the game's encounters are, say, doubled in difficulty the game will take 200 hours to complete. Nor am I sure what depleting the characters' base attributes will do, they're almost irrelevant; as the Battle Arena demonstrates one's power is entirely about equipment.

just give it a go if you would like to replay the game with more challenge.

you can always speed up the game at tedious parts using epsxe.

I really liked:
8. I enjoyed the story of an awkward teenager coming to grips with his emotions and falling in love. I liked the open-ness of the junction system. And I loved the music.
10. I also enjoyed the love story, music, straightforward game play, and sphere grid.
13. I enjoyed the fast-paced game play, changing paradigms, and the crystarium. I liked Vanille and Fang's role

I haven't played FFIX, X-2, XI Online, XII or XIII.

Of the rest:

FFVI is best, followed by...
FFIV
FFV
FFIII
FFII
FFI
FFVII
FFX
FFVIII


The names are in roman numerals, so that's what I called them. Think of this as a learning opportunity.

FF7 & FF8 erm... no. Horrible convoluted storys with hackyned plot pieces. Aeries death sequence still makes me laugh, and really it sums up a lot of stuff that happened in the 32-Bit era, video gaming was trying to run before it had learnt to walk.

I did enjoy Final Fantasy 6 to some extent, and FF3 was good fun. But the series has never decided whether I purchase a console or not.

Final Fantasy XII (12) is my favorite. VI (6), VII (7), X (10), and V (5) would round out my top 5.

Final Fantasy 12 doesn't get nearly enough love in my opinion, it offers so much more in terms of gameplay over any other FF I've ever played, excepting Tactics, of course. Tactics is actually my favorite game to bear the "Final Fantasy" moniker, but that one was, for the most part, an FF in name only.

6. I could never get into any others.

1 - Poor originally, but the remake versions make it tolerable.
2 - Ditto, but marginally better than 1.
3 - I only played this one for about an hour with an NES ROM translation, but I didn't care for it at all.
4 - Great game except every version has its own specific problems.
5 - Good, but not great. The job system feels "wasted" on a standard JRPG battle system, and the plot is dull.
6 - My favorite of the main series, and one of my favorite RPGs.
7 - Definitely has its issues, but I find it maintains a certain charm. I liked it, although the last 10% or so of the game was a real drag.
8 - After a great start, the plot becomes absolutely retarded (starting near the end of disc 1), and the battles become very tiresome. It's pretty bad. Still, I find it "interesting" in a sense, even if I don't actually like it. It's like a train wreck!
9 - Great. I especially really liked the characters. My second or third favorite (along with 4). My only major complaint is that the ending comes out of nowhere and is god-awful.
10 - Hated it. (Read in "Men on Film" voice) I still don't understand why this one was, and remains, so well-liked. The plot is stupid and everyone's whining the whole time. The battle system is also pretty crap.
12 - Ambivalent. I loved some of the changes it made to the series, and I loved the setting. But the plot and battle system both just didn't come together for me. Call it a near miss.
13 - Bloated crap.

FF8 is actually my favorite one. Though it was also the first one I ever played. I really enjoyed the battle system in it. I found the story to be ok though there are better ones in other RPGs of course. Of the ones I've played I'd rate them as follows:

1) FF8
2) FF3
3) FF4
5) FF6 (I haven't beaten it actually but I like what I've played of it.)
6) FF10
7) FF7

How anyone can like FF8 is beyond all of my cognitive abilities.
I can figure out women and quantum physics better then I can figure out why people like FF8.
The battle system is terrible (it rewards you for being a masochist), the storyline is godawful both in writing and being boring as fuck, the character's are unlikable and constantly act retarded, plus it's filled with plot holes up the ass. The junction system is an overly complex, boring mechanic. The graphics are good for the PS1, that's about it. I can't find any other redeeming quality in the game.

How do you go from Cyan seeing his family go on the Phantom Train to this? HOW?

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

How anyone can like FF8 is beyond all of my cognitive abilities.
I can figure out women and quantum physics better then I can figure out why people like FF8.
The battle system is terrible (it rewards you for being a masochist), the storyline is godawful both in writing and being boring as fuck, the character's are unlikable and constantly act retarded, plus it's filled with plot holes up the ass. The junction system is an overly complex, boring mechanic. The graphics are good for the PS1, that's about it. I can't find any other redeeming quality in the game.

How do you go from Cyan seeing his family go on the Phantom Train to this? HOW?

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Once you figure it out the junction system is actually pretfy easy and rewarding. For example if you are in a dungeon with lots of fire enemies you can junction fire magic to the right stats and get healed every time an enemy uses fire based attacks.

On the plus side, the card game is good...

I never understood the FF8 hate. The first time I started the game I got confused and hated it. The second time, I actually listened in the tutorials and understood that the junctions requires a fair amount of thinking to do it right. The strategy in the games for the most of the battling is all in the junctioning, but that's pretty unintuitive since for almost all the FF games before (and after), equipment is pretty linear; you find the next strongest thing, equip it and move on mowing down enemies.

Regardless I'd still say that like most I place FF6 near the top in the best games, FF4 is probably next, then FF9, FF2(Guy speaks beaver after all), FF8, FF10, and FF7. I played the others but they all fall below that cutoff point in my opinion, but I'm not sure what I think of FF13 long term yet, still digesting it. I also enjoyed FFX-2 quite a bit, but I'm not sure where it would fall in there.

FF12 was a chore to me, and I couldn't stand the game; it's probably the least fun of the series that I played. If I want to play an MMO instead of a console RPG I'll do that, and the fact that I had to buy AI abilities just seemed like a crutch.

It's a tie between 6 and 7 for me. Both of them had awesome stories, characters and gameplay.

Final Fantasy 7 was the first RPG I ever played, so obviously it holds a special place in my heart. But it was also a damn good game, which many people seem to forget in all their anti-fanboy-popularity-hatism-whatever. It hasn't aged well at all, I'll admit, and I find it hard to fully enjoy it nowadays because in many ways it looks and sounds so clunky. But at the time, FF7 was absolutely breathtaking and showed us things we had never expected from a videogame. The story is also deeper, richer and more multi-layered than any other FF game I've played, and I do like the fact that the story has an open ending. Last but not least, FF7's gameplay holds up very well and is still one of my favorites. After playing FF6, it became clear to me that FF7's gameplay is mostly a refinement of the template set by FF6, but that's a good thing IMHO. Square didn't take too many risks with FF7's gameplay, and as a result it's one of the more approachable and balanced RPG systems out there.

Final Fantasy 8 was a difficult one for me. After FF7, the hype was incredible and the long wait excruciating. When FF8 finally came out, everything was rose-colored at first, but after a while things started getting blah. The story was kinda lame, and the battle system is very very obtuse. If you don't pay a lot of attention to the tutorials and just play the game as it comes to you, you'll just end up spamming those overly long GF's over and over again, because that'll be the only way to do any kind of damage. Obviously, that strategy stops working at some point, and I never managed to finish my first playthrough.
After several years and several failed retries, I finally decided to sit down, learn the game and devise a good strategic approach. That strategy basically boiled down to: whenever you encounter a new kind of magic, stop and keep drawing that magic until you have 99 of it, then junction that and never cast the spell in combat. That, and buff up enough at the start to be able to beat the mecha-spider-thing early on, to get a good head-start. Once I adopted that strategy, the game suddenly opened up to me and became really fun. Okay, the story is still all over the place and never really goes anywhere, but the RPG part can be quite enjoyable. In the end, I finished most if not all sidequests, collected all GF's, beat all the optional bosses and finished the game with ease. So yeah, eventually FF8 managed to leave me satisfied.

Final Fantasy 9 simply rocks. I waited a long time to play the game, what with the initial disappointment of FF8 and the introduction of a new console generation, but once I got FF9 I was hooked in no time. The game has great visuals, a fun story with a charming cast of characters, and fantastic music. The battle system didn't leave too much of an impression on me, but it never got in the way either, which makes it okay in my book. It's not the deepest or most complex game in the series, but you can tell the creators had a lot of fun making FF9, and that shines through in the game.

Let's see, I should put Final Fantasy 6 in here somewhere too. I only played the PlayStation port, which is marred by some technical issues (loooooooading), but the game's qualities do still shine through. I never finished FF6 unfortunately, because other games pulled away my attention at the time, but I did see it through to the World of Ruin. The best thing I can say is that I wish I had played the game in the SNES era, because I would have appreciated it more back then. In early 2002, I found it a bit difficult to be really grabbed by the time.

Okay, this post is getting way too long. I'll leave it at this for now, and continue with the PS2 games later on.