Topic: Final fantasy discussion thread

I did something last night that I should've done at the very start of the game - switched difficultly to story focused. Not because the game is challenging but because it shaves a lot of time off fighting mini-bosses and bosses.
See, I'm at that point where I let the story just go over my head, it's taking itself way too seriously and I miss that charm which FF games are known for. Some of the better characters in the game have been killed off and Clive just reminds me of grumpy Geralt except without the wit and charisma of our famous witcher. I've just had a scene that made Jill a lot more interesting but that's only because she actually did something.

Apart from all of this, I still can't stop playing the game.

@ApostateMage Oh, I guess I misunderstood how the game describes story mode. I was under the impression that the only difference was that it automatically equipped the accessories that make battle actions more automated and easier to perform. I didn’t realize it also affected enemy health, etc. Good to know.

@themcnoisy Agreed. I think over time FF13 has become much more appreciated. I was always a fan of the game, even though it’s not my favorite of the series. But the combat was indeed fun once you got into it. And I do think FF7R struck a nice balance between old and new.

Are you playing 16 yet, boss? I just dabbled in the opening tutorial and I’m going to come back to it in a couple weeks when I clear some other games first. I think I’ll really like it, but with it being so button-mashy I wonder if I’ll grow tired of it. Fortunately I have to spread my games out over several weeks and my play sessions are by necessity shorter so I usually won’t get bored of a game as quickly as most who binge them in one week.

@Th3solution I've sold the PS5. I Couldn't stand the controller. So no rofl.

@themcnoisy Oh yeah, I remember now. 😄
Well, I’ll let you know if FF16 is worth picking up another PS5 for. Or maybe by early next year you could jump back on for FF7 Rebirth.
You’d have to tolerate the DualSense to play it though.

@Th3solution Alluding back to an older conversation within this thread. FF7 remake was a weird one.

I loved almost everything they did. Bar the memory ghost nonsense. I will never understand why story writers have to explain alternative universes or t Junction Canon. Memory ghosts is such a ridiculous concept and waters down the ff7 remake as a game in it own right. Now wherever changing the overall story in such a manner is sensible going forward? The jury will certainly be out. Otherwise it was a great experience and a ton of fun.

Yeah the decision to can the ps5 was in part due to gamepass and ms rewards. I play a lot of games and those two benefits combined has saved me a small fortune. I think I've had £150 in game vouchers so far from ms rewards and am 70% there on my next £25 voucher. I have 40 games in my to play list on gamepass (of admittedly varying quality) and a backlog of games I've bought in sales. I miss the big PS games but the money I'm saving is significant and I really look forward to redeeming vouchers and picking up slightly older games in sales. Like olli olli world, the house of the dead remake and the spyro trilogy most recently. I suppose I'm using it like the old ps instant game collection.

@Kidfried Maybe there is, but then there's something wrong with me too as I have very little to complain about in Final Fantasy VII Remake as well. My love for the game actually grew when I played the PS5 version, which was my second time through the game. While I may say I like this game or that game better for a particular console generation, the game is still very special regardless and one I probably still think about more than others. It's one of the rare games that left a really lasting impression, even if it took two tries to get there for me.

@Kidfried @KilloWertz Same here, I found very little to complain about the remake, and I adored the original when I first played it. I find it exciting that I'm usure of what comes next.

I have an itching to play the DLC soon with all this chatter about the series.

@Kidfried @JohnnyShoulder @KilloWertz I also wasn't bothered by the Ghosts in the remake and had played the original a few
years back. Still have to play Yuffie DLC though.

Currently playing through XVI and on the final boss of the first games pixel remaster

It's funny how the trailers for XVI made so many people go "this is just a generic fantasy game, not a Final Fantasy" while in reality the game makes it very obvious that it's definitely another entry in the series pretty early on.
The worldbuilding, characters and general aesthetic don't stray from the core of the series one bit.
What is different is the tone of the story (more mature and involves a lot of dying) and, obviously, the combat.
I've just gone past the 2nd time skip last night and I'm loving it so far, especially the boss battles (even if it's all a bit too easy for my taste).

@JohnnyShoulder You should enjoy the DLC more than I did initially. Yuffie's combat is very different from the cast from the main game, so when I jumped in shortly after beating it a second time, I royally sucked at it and dropped it. I went back to it last year and highly enjoyed it, as the difference was no longer an issue since there had been a good amount of time in between.

@Kidfried @KilloWertz @MightyDemon82 Sounds good. I don't often get dlc, especially so far out from playing the main game but am willing to make an exception in this case.

@JohnnyShoulder I can confirm that the Yuffie DLC (Intermission, I guess it’s called) is quite good. I played it after a long break from the main game also and like @Killowertz says it’s one of those few instances where that may actually be advantageous to have lost all the muscle memory. It plays like it’s own little standalone, although narratively has its share of tendrils to the core game. Unlike actual independent ‘expandalone’ entries like Lost Legacy and Mile Morales, Intermisson doesn’t quite surpass it’s bigger sibling, but it’s more fun in a lot of ways.

Picked up a couple of older Final Fantasy games to ask the question... was Final Fantasy really better in the past? At least in the case of 8, I got to the tutorial about the Junction System and the Elem Atk J's and stuff and just went... yeah, I am good, I'll play something else. I dunno how I beat this game as a kid, feel like I need a Masters Degree to navigate this. I am overwhelmed and so very tired.

Played a couple of hours of 12, 10, 9 and 7, all of them are... fine so far, but I definitely feel spoiled by just how strong those opening few hours are in 16. I guess the irony is 16 actually closes up from there into a pretty shallow title, whereas I know these are going to open out into much deeper games.

Nine was always my favourite as a kid, but I might just focus on 10 for now. It being remastered makes it feel a bit more modern, and the reworked Sphere Grid is an excellent QOL feature. I could play 12, but its combat system is kinda weird, not sure whether I like it. I somehow beat all of these games as a kid, playing them now I dunno how.

As an adult, I do prefer the purity of 7's turn based combat over all the others. 10 doesn't seem to have the weird wait for the bar to charge thing so you can do an input 8 and 9 uses which makes combat feel more traditional, but I wish I could disable that thing in 10 where you have to like input in Street Fighter combos with some special moves.

@Pizzamorg I think the problem with 8 was more than draw system than the junction one; it was a pain finding an enemy with a spell you needed and then just constantly using draw on them to get enough spells.

The GF system worked reasonably well with quite different abilities you could unlock. Between FF8 using boost on GFs (and MGS with the torture scene) I perfected being able to hammer a button on the PS1 controller really quickly

Goodness, yes. The drawing system was weird, made the flow of battle feel really odd.

I am sure the Junction system is great if you put the time into it, the deeper and more complex the system the better. But it requires strong tutorialisation, which this just didn't have for me. I was immediately thrown headfirst into an overwhelming spiral of menus. It kept showing me options in the tutorial I then didn't have access to myself when I went into the system? Just exhausting.

I also kept getting prompts like 'make sure you apply Blizzard to your attacks!' and I'm like... but I have no Blizzards to apply to my attacks? If this is a tutorial, aren't you meant to give me the necessary materials?

@Kidfried And it’s cool that they’re happy to try completely different systems and gameplay styles from game to game too.

@Pizzamorg ooh, and another weird one for FF8; how your money earned is linked to your SeeD ranking which you level up by taking tests.

I don’t think I ever answered one myself as I had the list of answers off the internet or from OPM back in the day.

I dunno how accurate the PS5 stats for this are, but they put me around 20 hours deep and a little over 50 percent of the way through FF16. I have just felled the second major antagonist.

My overall feelings with the game are still that it is... fine. But it is definitely a fine that feels less fine with every passing hour.

As we discussed previously, there is very much a world where I would have hated this and so I have to keep reminding myself of that, but just... I dunno man. It feels like with every hour of FF16 played, when I turn the game off, I am x amount less interested in logging back in again.

I know I am labouring points already shared, but I just think the pacing of this game is so awful. I've still yet to be given any true justification as to why the hubs and their MMO style side quests need to exist. There are plenty of extended cutscenes that could serve as cool off periods for the games bigger moments, the hubs in addition are just complete overkill. Giving the whole game this pedestrian, aimless, mumbling, quality to it all.

That is why I question the PS5 tracker, as I can't believe I have only played 20 hours, as I am feeling that same sense of exhaustion that starts setting in like 60 hours into the grind of clearing every marker in an open world game, where you are beyond the point of the rewards being worth it, but you are doing it for the sake of it.

The lack of proper skill trees, meaningful progression and transformative itemisation just really makes the game feel so static, and slow. You get new abilities as you go along, yes, but they don't really make the game any more interesting. The combats simplicity is a blessing for me as someone who is so rubbish at these games, but the simplicity means new skills seem chained down due to this wider aim of keeping it accessible at all costs. Every ability you unlock is just different coloured sources of damage, elements don't matter, there aren't status effects or debuffs or anything else (or at least not so far at this point in the game, maybe they come later. But if they do come later, why leave it so long?).

This means your choice is do you want the lightning rod attack or the yellow rock punch attack? Why pick one over the other? Err...

Based on the hours played, each set of abilities must have come just a few hours apart from one another, but it felt like eons. Every encounter is basically completely identical and as fun as the combat is, it needs something else to support it, especially if combat at hour 1 and hour 10 is only meaningfully denoted by the fact that now you have green and blue powers as well.

Even with things like the Eikon battles and the set pieces, as spectacular as these are, again, in a game so lacking in challenge, mechanical depth or really any kind of RPG systems, I'm just not sure it is enough. Not for a game that is as long as this is, or at least for as long as this game feels.

The more you play through these, the more obvious it becomes just how shallow and on rails they are. They feel like they were designed as cutscenes first, and then had some arbitrary gameplay bits slotted in afterwards, and basically all the gameplay parts add absolutely nothing to these and are mostly just QTEs anyway.

I feel like of everything in this post, the most reductive thing I can say is not any of the stuff above, and rather the idea that had the hubs I had gone to in between these moments been removed, the game would somehow magically be fixed. I just don't believe that. But I do think in a game that ultimately offers so little when it comes to what the player themselves engage with, keeping the game tight and always steering the player through the game at a good pace should have been the objective. Instead, each identical fight in a corridor is held miles apart between extended blocks of cutscenes and Clive going to get three Xs which involves pressing three Xs in a specific location, so you can get 7 xp and crafting materials you haven't needed for the last 15 hours.