Topic: General Final Fantasy Thread

@Snaplocket Xenoblade X was their first open world game.

@Snaplocket Personally, I don't think XV is the best, but I also wouldn't say it's a terrible game. It's definitely not Versus 13, but Versus 13 was a mess. Not to mention, 15 mostly got ruined because of development hell and outlash for a couple of scenes that people didn't like, which caused a whole chunk of the game to be removed.

@Dezzy That's a fair point, one I have seen mentioned in my online wanderings. Still, I don't understand why the game just didn't spend longer in development and tack all story DLC onto the main game to flesh things out. Not to mention it seems odd that they went all multimedia with the entire plot.

...Well, I guess money would be a valid reason from a business point of view, but from a logical point of view, it's just odd. I think many true fans would have paid a bit extra for the full package, though I could see people whining about paying more than usual for a game too. I really feel for some devs and studios sometimes. Many facets of gamer communities are fickle beasts. You just can't please everyone.

@TheJGG Keep on with the impressions! I enjoy reading them. By the way, if you're getting exhausted with/don't have time for the marathon posting in the Chit-Chat Thread, please don't feel obligated to string together long responses on my account. I won't be offended.

I didn't watch Kingsglaive, and I knew what was happening. It's not really a requirement unless you don't watch the trailers for Versus, or just haven't followed up with the news on the game.

I've seen extremely split opinions on whether FF8 is good or terrible, what's your guy's take?

Pretty good, @Screen .... The junction system does take some getting used to but it then becomes quite easy to break the game with it! I'm sure some of us can help with that if you got stuck, too

Because it had been in development as Versus XIII for over 5 years, so when they put Tabata in charge, they apparently told him he had 3 years (or something close to that) to just finish it, and was basically forced to release whatever they had at that point.

In hindsight it's easy to say they should've just given it more time and money, but you have to remember that at this point in time, Final Fantasy was at the lowest point it had been at in decades. They'd just released 3 quite poorly received XIII games, with the sales figures completely collapsing by the 3rd game (it was the worst selling FF game since Final Fantasy 2 on the NES), and this was happening at the same time as Japan was completely abandoning home consoles.

So I think they were legitimately worrying that XV would only sell like 3-4 million, which they openly stated might have ended the whole series. Luckily it ended up selling 9 million, and is the 2nd highest seller in the series (if you exclude remasters), so we now have the luxury of looking back and pointing out the flaws!

You can figure some of it out, sure. But there's key information that you wouldn't understand without watching Kingsglaive. Like why is Luna's brother fighting for the enemy? What happened to the crystal? (it's barely mentioned in the game that they took it to Niflheim), and most importantly, what does the Ring of the Lucii actually do? What's it for, and who can use it? A major event in one of the DLC assumes that you already know that from watching Kingsglaive.
Not to mention the Comrades DLC is based on those characters from Kingsglaive, so you need to understand it for any of that to make sense.

@Snaplocket

The sales numbers fell off quite dramatically with the series. I think it's fair to say that most people weren't that into it.

The last I checked it was something like:

XIII: 7.5 million
XIII-2: 3.5 million
XIII-3: 1.5 million.

That's definitely a bad reception.

@Snaplocket
FF XIII was really frustrating for me.
There are a lot of enemies with gargantuan HP, No Defense / Magic Defense parameter, really hard to earn money so i must exploit from certain enemies to get rich.
FF XIII was about exploit the things.
Exploit Trigger percentage to increase the damages, exploit the rare items from certain enemies to get rich, exploit CP by find the right enemies for CP farming. It was really frustrating to keep exploit the things all the time.
I prefer FF VIII in all terms (gameplay, character design, music, storyline) than FF XIII.

@Tyranexx Honestly it's starting to drain me. I may reduce their frequency to somewhere around twice a week, because while I really enjoy seeing what you have to say on various topics getting the words on the screen does take a long time. While I'm not worried of offending you I will get to your last reply at some point!

@Snaplocket

I don't think anyone said XIII was a failure in terms of sales. I'm pretty they were quite happy with that. It sold close to 8 million in total.

The 'disappointment' was in terms of the general fan sentiment toward it, and the fact that that sentiment was then reflected in the massive decline in sales for the 2 sequels.

In principle I would agree though. I don't think they need to be these massive budget games. Especially as JRPGs are one of those genres where you can compromise on quite a lot without really ruining the basic formula. But for whatever reason, Square have always been committed to the idea that Final Fantasy has to be on the cutting edge of technology. Ever since FF7 they've been quite devoted to that idea.

Personally I would've been fine with FF16 being a Switch exclusive rather than PS5. That would've been totally fine with me. Lower budget, whilst still being advanced enough to do some impressive graphics, and a massive install base (especially in Japan).

@Dezzy Ah, so XV had to deal with development purgatory. I've only clued into the Final Fantasy series in the last couple of years so wasn't aware of its troublesome history at the time. I'd heard the occasional rumble about the series before that, but nothing in-depth; I didn't know many who played RPGs outside of Pokemon until I gravitated towards them on my own during high school.

@TheJGG No hurry at all! And...to be honest, it's starting to drain me too. Partially due to how nuts my schedule has been as my chunk of the planet slowly eases back towards "normal" (which was a subjective term even before the past year), which is why I haven't been crawling the forums as frequently. That said, I DO always reply eventually, at least until the gist of the post amounts to "Okay" or "Yep". XD

There are leaks and rumors floating around about versus, but the general consensus is that Nomura didn't know what the heck he wanted it to be, and that's why it ultimately went into development hell.

All that Final Fantasy XV talk inspired me to launch the game. I could never really get into the combat on the main game, but I realized... Hey I know how that story goes why don't I give the DLC chapters a try instead?

And that was a great idea indeed. I played through Episode Gladio and had a fun time with it. It's pretty short, and the combat was much simpler as Gladio, so I managed to get through it twice, once playing normally, and then again on the score attack mode (I even got the ever so famous "rugged" costume for him).

Now with the refresher on how's the game supposed to be played, I might give the main story another shot one of these days. But I'll probably continue with the extra chapters first instead.

Good choice @Eel! Hopefully you'll be able to appreciate the game a bit more. According to Dezzy's guide I'm two chapters away from beginning the meat of the Royal Edition content, because at that point I'd have to switch to the DLC chapters.

@TheJGG Ah you're almost there then! You're quick. I'm sure you'll like the extra chapters.

Too bad they cancelled the other ones they had planed, Lunafreya's would've been quite interesting.

@Eel You can still buy the novelization, but yeah.. I wish they didn't just cancel it. I guess square was ready to move on to other projects though, like XVI.

From what I hear, the story they ended up going with in the novel version was all alternative-timeline type stuff, so I'm partly glad they didn't end up doing those extra episodes. I didn't want alternate timelines, I just wanted more added to the official canon story.

@Dezzy Plus, the alternative timeline felt cheap as it was only made because of people complaining about the game’s sad ending

@VoidofLight

Lol well ironically I didn't have any problem with the ending until they added that extra explanation in Episode Ardyn. That really made it a lot more cynical than it was originally.