Not quite true. Before the ~15th century, the queen moved like the king and the pawns could only move 1 square from their starting square. These changes were made to make the game more exciting and less slow.
Story wise, all different with a certain set of tropes being ever present (crystal will be a nonsense word in your head by the end). Gameplay wise, they can be samey with significant variations on progression (8 being the most out there IMHO). After 13, it does start getting much more variable with the formula.
Final Fantasy is like Black Mirror, there are common themes, plot points, and names that persist throughout the series. However no two numbered titles share the same worldbuilding, lore, and characters.
It’s like what happened with Quake I-IV but on steroids. Very different games held together by a promise of what emotions you’d expect.
Yes and this isn’t necessary because the two sides are completely identical. No differences in pieces or terrain or anything so there’s no need to change a piece to make it stronger or weaker.
Actually it has had balance changes. Chess clock for instance is a balance update between the players, but there’s also been balancing between pieces. En passant and castling but also changing how the pieces work (for example bishop).
Despite the obvious symmetry of the game there’s still a lot to balance.
You are quite correct that an asymetrical game is much harder to balance.
However having identical sides and a symmetric playing field doesn’t always guarantee a balanced game. For example, if one piece or position dominates all others it can lead to a lack of viable options and just one way to play, making the game uninteresting. You don’t just want the players to have equal strength, you also want the universe of possible playing strategies to contain many different strong options.
The name is a bit silly but I love the story behind it.
For the uninformed: When Square was developing FF, the story goes that the company was facing bankruptcy and that this would be their last game. It ended up being a hit and the rest of history.
Supposedly and alternatively, it may have been so named as the designer’s (Hironobu Sakaguchi) last shot in the game industry and he had resolved to stop if it didn’t work.
As interesting as it is, thats actually a common misconception. It wasn’t due to facing bankruptcy and years later Sakaguchi gave a different account from his supposed last effort at making a game.
This Famitsu article details it as such because they hoped it would be abbreviated as FF because it sounded good in Japanese. Their initial name was Fighting Fantasy but that had potential trademark issues, so they settled on Final Fantasy. Apparently they also didn’t care so much about what it was and any words that abbreviated to FF would work.
I like the more recent story as it gives some certainty to the series from the beginning, but I suspect it was a mixture of both Sakaguchis possible last hurrah and wanting a “cool” name.
I got the game and both DLCs for $8 on steam. An absolutely unbelievable deal for that much content.
This play-through, I made the mistake of beating one of them before I finished the main campaign, and now I’m so overpowered that the main quest isn’t super engaging. I’m trying to just knock it out now before starting over.
I had originally started it on the most difficult setting, and was only doing the main quest, but that was like, pretty tough because I was only like level 3 trying to finish the bloody baron quest. So I started over on a reduced difficulty and then made the mistake of trying to ‘complete’ areas before moving into new areas. I basically way over leveled and now pretty much everything weaker than god is paper and just melts.
Next play through I’m either going to try a ‘pure witcher’ play-through where I want to always make the ‘most-witcher’ like decision every time, or, alternatively, I’m considering going ‘utter fuckboi’ and just try to bang any and everything that isn’t nailed down. Either way it will be on the max of max difficulties. Speed running could be fun to but I want to have a 100% run before that.
This is exactly what I was thinking reading some of the comments. “Back in my day you could store everything as long as you trusted someone enough to keep an instance open while you throw valuable stuff at the ground and switch accounts”
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Aktywne