Topic: Final fantasy discussion thread

@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?

The classic Final Fantasies were definitely good, but all of them since VI did quite some weird things. I like that Final Fantasy is a weird game, and each of them has quirks that some people think is really cool, while others hate them. In that sense, XVI is very much a Final Fantasy game.

They're great because they're imperfect.

@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.

I wonder where do the fans rank ffxvi in their lists of mainline titles. I think most people are like it's far from the worst but not close to the best

@Arisen 7th, according to this article:
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2023/07/final-fantasy-16-is-t...

Of course this includes non-mainline I think too.

Borrowed FFXVI from a friend a few days ago and have been mainlining it in an attempt to avoid spoilers. Got far enough in now to say that it’s possibly got the worst writing with regards to female characters that I’ve seen in a long, long time. I’m not even sure that it passes the Bechdel test. A lot of the game is really great, the political stuff is good, Cid is a cool dude and Clive has a pretty complex emotional arc. The combat isn’t really for me as it goes on, I’m not finding it to be that satisfying fighting mobs. It’s also like, really really linear. That can work in some games but it reminds me a bit of XIII in that respect. So it’s an overall hesitant 7 and I’ve just finished the quest ‘Through the Maelstrom’ if that non-spoilery says where I am.

Worth saying that it really pays to have a pal who buys games Day 1, gives them to me to play and then sells them to CEX 😂

Final Fantasy XVI received a small update later on tonight, probably within the last few hours since there wasn't an update for it when I was on there playing it 4 hours ago. I'm not sure what was all included in the update besides them finally adding a Motion Blur slider (from 0-5). I put it down to 0, but didn't have much time to test it out just now. I did notice the ghosting was gone while panning the camera, but I just did things around the Hideaway since I didn't have a whole lot of time, so I can't say how it is without motion blur in combat now.

@KilloWertz Thanks for the info! I'm glad that Square Enix put out this update right before I'm about to face the final boss.

@LtSarge So you can at least see who you're fighting without the extremely heavy motion blur? You're welcome.

I'm nowhere near that far along. I'm ready to start Captial Punishment, which is the quest where you go back to Rosalith to fight Hugo. It will be nice to play it without the extreme motion blur regardless, even though I had gotten about as used to it as you could.

UGH

@Pizzamorg I feel exactly the same the same way, still wondering how it got great reviews when the design flaws are really this obvious.

It is like all these people played the first couple of hours and reviewed it based on that. Playing as much of the game as I have, I feel like I would have a hard time justifying giving the game a 7 (if I scored games like that), instead the bulk of the reviews are 8s and 9s, making it one of the highest rated games of the year to me and this is just madness as far as I am concerned.

I appreciate people can like different things, and I suppose seeing a game as very shallow is still potentially a matter of taste, but when its a Final Fantasy game, I just dunno how you can just ignore the limitations and shortcomings this has and slap a high score on it anyway. It is missing fundamental, core, parts of what makes an RPG an RPG. And you could argue it is just an action game and needs to be measured against that only, but even then, you are telling me this is a 9 out of 10 action game? It has only one combo!

@Ralizah I can totally understand why some people are liking the structure, God of War’s reboot struck a chord with a lot of people after all, but it obfuscates the journey for me and makes the world feel smaller. Another pet peeve, the game’s unflinching refusal to have any people of colour doesn’t gel with the world’s clear multiple cultures. They even do the wee music jingle while showing the desert kingdom, real Agrabah vibes, and then when you walk around everybody’s talking like they’re from Sheffield. Also just the fact that for all Yoshi-P’s nonsense about black people not fitting the world or something, it’s all just because there’s slavery at every turn that isn’t motivated by race and it would require better writers to navigate that without massive controversy.

@nessisonett I miss when big-budget JRPGs were grand, world-spanning adventures that invited you to plumb their depths while maintaining just enough structure to feel like you were consistently making progress. You get that with Xenoblade Chronicles and little else these days.

I thought God of War was alright, but it's not what I want Final Fantasy to be. And even GoW would have been better if it loosened up a bit and allowed more naturalistic exploration/dungeon-crawling than it did. The best parts of that game were always non-story bits.