I’m the weirdo that thinks FF8 was the best one. Squall actually grew as a character, matured from an angsty emo teen into an adult who assassinates authoritarian leaders (or at least tries to)… And don’t forget that Rinoa launches her dog like a wrist-mounted crossbow, as an attack. Best FF game.
Teenage me was blown away by the “free, unlimited” use of Guardian Force (summons in previous games). First time summoning Shiva was magical.
The worst part, for me, was the excessive use of FMV parts, mostly because my PSX suffered a cousin-related accident and would, more often than not, fail to properly play videos. It was like 5s, freeze for 3s, 1s play, another second frozen, 10s…
I loved 8! I got so into the characters and their stories. I was always excited to see more Laguna & Co. I remember downloading the Eyes On You song, probably off one of those sketchy P2P music sharing services.
I like it but found the fear of using items you might later need too be exacerbated to an uncomfortable degree by the magic system. I suspect I’d enjoy it more today than when it came out.
It would be rad af if you could not only run Doom off of one of these (because they already run on Windows so it’s probably easy as hell to run Doom on it), but also somehow get the scanner part to use its laser to make one of those holographic keyboards to actually play Doom on it without any external devices.
Have you tried that fun fact? I know there was a meme claiming it, but I have never found any evidence of it actually being true, nor did I manage to replicate it on Amazon.
I did actually, and it worked, though they may have changed it by now.
Think I have a screenshot somewhere…
Edit: they’ve definitely altered the way it works. I’m sure there’s a way to get around whatever guardrails they added with enough creativity, unless they’ve completely rebuilt the model and removed any programming training data. https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/d5a506f2-ad22-4792-9859-1f3193e27c31.webp
What I love about the series is that there are so many varied entries that everyone can find their own favourite, consensus be dammed.
I’ll always consider VI the absolute peak Final Fantasy - beautiful pixel art, Active Time Battles, SNES Mode 7, brilliant score, a fantastic story with a memorable villain and a large and varied ensemble cast of great characters… It has it all for me.
I also have to somewhat ashamedly admit that for whatever reason I actually have some fondness for XV. I’ve posted about it before but I have such a hard time succinctly putting my feelings about it into words, because it is by no means a good game. It’s probably the biggest discrepancy I’ve experienced between the objective quality of a game and how much I enjoyed playing it. Whether it’s the stellar fishing mini game or the random wholesome interactions between the gang and the overall bro trip vibe I don’t know but there is something there. And the score is no Uematsu perhaps but I really enjoyed it and thought they did some wonderful leitmotif work.
Yeah it’s funny now that you mention it but I don’t really remember the battle music if XV all that well. But I have stuff like Valse di Fantastica/Sunset Walz/Dewdrops at Dawn and Ardyn’s themes seared into my brain.
XII is my favourite as well. Interesting how controversial gambit system ended up to be, some love it, some hate it. I personally love that it gives the freedom to do any type of weird stuff you’d like to do and maintain good pace in battles.
Those who dislike it, I imagine, don’t enjoy combat where the player doesn’t have to push buttons, but 1) you never have enough gambit slots for everything you’d like to do, so you have to adapt and choose magicks/items yourself at times; 2) many RPGs suffer from exactly the opposite problem - you encounter a familiar enemy, know of one efficient way to defeat it and have to choose the same options in battles against it time after time just because you know that it works; mindlessly pushing a few buttons isn’t much different from not pushing any buttons at all in this case.
“If weak to fire then cast Fira”. You don’t even need to have your characters learn the weakness first by scanning them, they just intuit every weakness.
XII was one of the first mainline games I played through, and I really got into it. After playing most of the rest, I get why it doesn't come off as a "proper" FF game. That said, I always wanted more just like it. Perhaps a spinoff, or maybe ivalice alliance could be reinstated as a more tactics-focused FF franchise while the main line goes on doing... whatever it did for XVI.
I’ve played Tactics only this year and was surprised how much XII resembles it in mechanics despite these games belonging to different RPG subgenres. It lead me to think that XII only happened because there was this proper foundation of Tactics, so I doubt there’d ever be another mainline game in Ivalice, but more Tactics games are possible, I think.
I wish I’ll have enough time at some point to get to the Ivalice storyline in XIV.
1 - ...I respect the historical importance of this game.
2 - Actually, dual-wielding shields and attacking yourself to grind evasion is peak game design.
3 - Beta for FF5. Shame about that final dungeon.
4 - First game that actually holds up.
5 - Peak.
6 - I liked this game up until I found out that I was supposed to be grinding three distinct parties the whole time.
7 - I went into this expecting the first 3D installment to be another example of historically important but poorly aged. Was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up.
8 - I went into this knowing it's the weird one. I was the sicko that liked 2, but I still couldn't get through it.
9 - Bought it alongside 8, when I dropped 8 I never got around to this. I will eventually... maybe...
10 - Perfects the classic formula while still feeling sufficiently modernized. Uh, for some definition of modern...
12 - Hated hated hated the combat. Painfully tedious to take manual control, automation is too primitive. And I don't want to automate the game away, I want to play it!
1 - …I respect the historical importance of this game.
I had a coworker who swore by this game in the nineties. When I finally got to it, I played most of the way through, but lost the save and haven’t been able to pay through again.
4 - First game that actually holds up.
Played through in college over a weekend. Got pretty far in. Loved it.
6 - I liked this game up until I found out that I was supposed to be grinding three distinct parties the whole time.
Borrowed from a friend in high school and beat sneaking to play overnight. Fell in love with the series here. My friend from work said this was the weakest of the three, but I appreciated the story.Three distinct parties don’t matter if you constantly rotate them and then use the yellow dinos to power level.
7 - I went into this expecting the first 3D installment to be another example of historically important but poorly aged. Was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up.
High school friends were all into it. I couldn’t play until I could get it to play on Bleem! Currently on my 15th play through.
8 - I went into this knowing it’s the weird one. I was the sicko that liked 2, but I still couldn’t get through it.
Friend of mine and I played all the way through on this. The draw system is unusual, but looking back it was a great story. It was weaker without the cyberpunk dystopia of Midgar, and felt like I was now playing as the enemy. I also remember the trigger system infuriatingly.
9 - Bought it alongside 8, when I dropped 8 I never got around to this. I will eventually… maybe…
This got so much criticism when it came out. It’s actually a beautiful game that sticks close to the original premise.
10 - Perfects the classic formula while still feeling sufficiently modernized. Uh, for some definition of modern…
The grid on this is different, and the game is linear compared to some of the others. In contrast the characters are each so distinct. Also, the voice acting was a huge change.
15 was also automated. My problem with an open world is that it feels like you should scrape the world clean. Also, I was never sure when to move forward and got stuck forever in the first area.
2 gets a bad rap. Hitting yourself to increase max health works against yourself in the long run. Many late game monsters do % of max health damage. Characters with inflated max health will struggle more in those battles. I played the game normally with minimal grinding and ran into no issue.
Percentage-based damage doesn't make you struggle more with more health, it just means a few attacks take the same number of hits to kill. You're never any worse for it, and you're still better against every other attack in the game.
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Aktywne