Topic: Final Fantasy VII, IX, X, X-2 and XII - Now with 80% more FF VIII

do any final fantasies have physical releases for switch, besides maxima and chocobo’s mystery dungeon?

@Tyranexx What, what, Dumbledore dies, I didn't know that?!?!

</sarc>

Anyway, yeah, that spoiler is, what, 20 years out of date? Do you want to know how The Crying Game ends as well? Even before the internet spoilers were a thing.

But yeah, VII's story....I mean the mood, the environments, characters, scenarios are cool, and the first 1/2 the story seems really great! And then it gets to the point of wait....this is what they did with all that setup? It doesn't even make sense.... Some LSD dealers must have made some serious money during development of that game.... And then Advent Children went and made it worse.

Yeah, I'd probably recommend VI and above for "the FF experience" unless you have specific 8 and early 16 bit nostalgia. IV is most fun if you think of it as a Dragon Quest clone

@Arbor X/X-2 and XII I believe will, but VII and IX don't have physical on any platform after PS1 and the old PC release.

@NEStalgia Hmm. Alright. I still have my Xbox 360 version. Maybe once I've worked through more of my backlog I'll give it another chance.

@Tyranexx FFVII's story is great. I mean, it's really crazy and epic and "out there," but it's full of classic moments and plot beats that I'll never forget. What it lacks in coherence it makes up for with ambition.

There's really nothing you can do to make the first two FF games fun (II, in particular, is borderline broken), but there's a fun DS remake of III that I'd recommend. It's not one of the stronger games in the series, but it's much closer in quality to IV and V than the original two games.

@ReaderRagfish IV is awesome. Maybe a step below VI and VII, but it's still a mid-to-top tier FF game. It's the first game in the series to really feel like it has some substantial thought put into the writing, and it shows.

FF9 or FF10 are the best to start with. Both are easy enough to understand (in terms of both the story and the game systems). Both have aged quite well, so they still look fairly nice graphically. And both are fairly traditional in their structure, so they represent the rest of the series quite well (meaning if you enjoy them, you'll probably enjoy the rest of the series too).

FF7 is excellent but hasn't aged as well, and also has a bit more complex story.

FF12 is great but isn't at all representative of the series in general, so playing it will be a very poor guide for the other games.

@Ralizah You have to bite down hard on your tongue as you deal with the story and the first portion of the game. It helps to just blurt out random obscenities and racial epithets as loud as you can every time you hear the word "fal'cie", "l'cie", "cie'th", "cocoon", "pulse", or every single time they show Hope's face. It definitely helps. I recommend it. Highly.

But the actual game-play is awesome (eventually.) Also I, like most, ignored XIII-2 and XIII-LR because of my initial opinion of XIII....but I came back to them when they made them X1 BC compatible. Those are actually decent, proper FF games. And by LR, Snow actually gets really cool, and Hope actually gets...well...I no longer imagined murdering him every time he spoke, so that's something. (-2 has the same battle system in a more traditional random encounter format. LR has a completely different system.)

Oh I second VII's moments, character moments, events etc being great. It's the actual narrative that really blows. "Out there" doesn't cut it. It just starts making up deus ex machina to explain away the other deus ex machina by the end, and the new ones make less sense than the ones before it, and it really cheapens the great setup they gave Sephiroth and the other plot threads when it just becomes "magic stuff, you wouldn't understand."

@ReaderRagfish VIII isn't a train-wreck, it's just.....boring....uneventful....generic feeling compared to the rest. And not in a good way. It's like they tried to marry VII, Phatasy Star, and a high school anime....and they got something that feels like a mix of VII, Phantasy Star, and a high school anime. Someday I'll complete it. Right after I get through those 300 or so other games in my backlog....

@Dezzy I lost you lost "FF10 story is easy to understand" At least you can work out in-game logic to it unlike VII that throws out it's own premise by the end. But it's still pretty loose with coherence. It suffers a little from the FFXIII "l'cie, fal'cie, cie'th" syndrome of talking about "Sin" as though you are supposed to know what they're talking about.... it's not a very easy to understand plot, really, unless you're used to odd anime story telling.

BUT, it is an easy to understand game system. Just the story is wonky.

Also, bro, what about 15, bro? No love for 15 dude? What gives, man. I mean like whoooh bro.

@NEStalgia I couldn't finish FFXV honestly. I was just so bored with the game. Even with model mods to swap Xenoblade characters in, it wasn't enough for me to continue on. It wasn't bad, it was just aggressively boring, which is much worse in my books.

I'm all for continuing on to see if the game gets better but from what I heard it doesn't really, so I just dropped it.

@EvilLucario I intend to get back to it just before VIII.

Truthfully I do want to get into it a little more. I was waiting for the happy ending DLC (ok, that sounds wrong), but now that it's cancelled, I should get back into it...someday.

@NEStalgia Mhm. I do want to try VII and IX again on PC with some graphical mods, but my interest in Final Fantasy has waned considerably in the past few years. But XV completely lost me with its combat system trying to be a real-time combat system without good fundamentals in offense and defense.

@NEStalgia

Which part didn't you understand? I found FF10 story very easy to understand.

It might be an incredibly silly plot, but I still found it easy to follow.

@NEStalgia: IV (and maybe V at least) might click with me then. I'm relatively new to DQ as well but have played/beaten V and have IV and VIII (DS and 3DS respectively) backlogged and have my eye on DQ XI S. The two 8-bit RPGs I've played haven't quite been my cup of tea (but weren't bad), but I am fond of 16-bit on up.

...And I thought MY backlog was bad lol.

I think you've given me my dose of daily raspberries.

@ReaderRagfish: I'm presuming II suffers from the infamous second game syndrome of the era?

@Ralizah: I still intend on playing VII, though I think my first FF will still officially be VI on my SNES Classic when I get around to it. That begs the question though....Why was it called Final Fantasy III on release here? Did we initially miss some releases?

I might look into that DS iteration of the true III down the line then, along with IV. The latter has popped up in my Amazon suggestions more than once IIRC.

@Tyranexx IV and VI were initially called II and III on the SNES because the real II, III, and V never came out on the West on their original platforms. II and V would eventually be released for the PS1 and III on the DS, but before that we had Final Fantasy on NES, then IV and VI on SNES. They thought it would be confusing if they just jumped to IV without II and III, so they just called IV the second game, and the same for VI as the third game.

@Dezzy The whole sort of time travel loop (not really but kinda) and, like XIII just throwing you into proper nouns that don't really work well in English, such as "Sin" as a proper name, but not directly referring to an entity (yet), but more of a force/event/concept. With flashbacks and all you start figuring pieces out after a while, but the intro did the same mistake as XIII, using terms for things and concepts the writers understood but forgot the viewer did not.

@EvilLucario Yes. Thank goodness Square made sure not to be confusing.

@NEStalgia Hey I didn't say it was a good idea :^]

@EvilLucario: I wondered if the confusion wasn't due to weird releases like you've explained. Thanks!

Maybe if it was Square Enix back then we would've had Final Fantasy II: Final Fantasy IV: Maxima Anglo Selenitic Dissonance and Final Fantasy III: Final Fantasy VI: Royal Interna Meridian Theosis

I've only seriously played the PlayStation FFs, and of those IX is definitely my favorite. X is good. I could never bring myself to finish VII. I watched my friend play VIII back in the day, and I have zero interest in it.

I also enjoy the two online games lol

@NEStalgia

The one part I agree is confusing is the time travel issue. (There was no actual time travel. They just made you think there was, for some unhelpful reason.)

How does VI compare to the rest of the series, gameplay-wise? I'm playing through it on the SNES Classic right now, and a lot of the stuff just seems extraneous. Is this normal, or do other games mix it up? I'll copy and paste my thoughts from the general thread:

I'm playing through 3/6 on my SNES Classic right now. I don't think I'm that far into it yet (I just did the opera scene and got on the airship). It's fun, but I don't think it compares to Chrono Trigger yet. It seems a lot easier, and there appears to be no reason to ever pick the Fight command over the special power. The only thing that makes it difficult is that the Blitz commands never register correctly so I usually waste a turn with Sabin. It's like Chrono Trigger was amazing, but more of a straightforward RPG, so they put a lot of extra fluff in this one that are mostly overpowered or useless (I actually don't know which game was made first). Does it pick up, or stay like this throughout the game?

@Xyphon22 VI is my favorite but I don't really like Final Fantasy. I've always held the opinion that Final Fantasy was never the king of JRPGs, with other games like Chrono Trigger and Golden Sun being far better.

VI is extremely unbalanced and while the story is good, that's not enough for me to overlook all of its problems in regular gameplay. Other games may also be broken at the high-end, but VI is broken right from the start.