The Final Fantasy Thread

[NothPrime]

I fuckin love Final Fantasy, don't you? It's a great series where the very worst games in the main numbered entries are "just fine." And also Final Fantasy XIII. I just finished that for the first time and it turned out to be exactly as good as everyone said it was. Which is not very. At all. This game kind of sucks. The story is a mess and the gameplay is mostly automated, but the Crystarium triggers the primal "number go up" part of RPGs.

The others really are stupidly good. Final Fantasy IV, VII, XIV, and XVI are personal favorites and all rule.

 

[Rosie]

I've at least tried every single mainline game in the series except for XI, and I've beaten IV through VIII, which are all great games.

I also recently beat Mystic Quest, which wears on you pretty quickly no matter how cool the soundtrack is and how cozy the graphics are. It's a pretty braindead game where the only difficulty actually comes from how oversimplified it is, because it gives you no options to deal with any actually challenging opposition that might pop up. Kinda like XIII really...

 

[GavinMcWario]

I really need to get around to actually playing more mainline Final Fantasy games at some point - the only ones I've played are X and XIV, and I haven't finished the main story for either yet.

 

[DBomb]

I have played them all. I've made it no secret that FF2 was one of my most-hated games EVER, and it has since been outsucked by 13. 4 isn't just my favorite FF, it's my favorite game period (Again, I have made NO secret of this)

As far as spinoffs, I've played Mystic Quest, World of Final Fantasy, and the renamed series that came out here as Final Fantasy: SaGa and Seiken Densetsu. I own a Crystal Chronicles game that i've never played, which I should take care of at some point.

I would like to play a Theatrhythm game, and I've never touched Dissidia in any form.

 

[Rosie]

I've said this a lot recently, but for posterity: I think FF13 is terrible not just because it sucks as a play experience, but because it is trying to coast off the Final Fantasy brand while simultaneously being ashamed of being an RPG, which informs a lot of its terrible choices. This makes me not respect the game, so it is the worst mainline FF to me by default. (And even including the franchise as a whole, I think only the FF7 Reheat games beat it by being that curious kind of "anti-art" in the vein of Rise of Skywalker.)

As far as spinoffs, I've played Mystic Quest, World of Final Fantasy, and the renamed series that came out here as Final Fantasy: SaGa and Seiken Densetsu. I own a Crystal Chronicles game that i've never played, which I should take care of at some point.

I would like to play a Theatrhythm game, and I've never touched Dissidia in any form.

I need to play WoFF properly; I got it a very long time ago and just got horribly distracted from it, a terrible fate that happens to a lot of actually good games in my collection.

I highly recommend Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. It does get very grindy if you're trying to get everything, but as a casual experience it's a wonderful trip through the musical history of FF, and the DLC goes ham with the amount of other Square RPGs get represented.

 

[GavinMcWario]

I highly recommend Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. It does get very grindy if you're trying to get everything, but as a casual experience it's a wonderful trip through the musical history of FF, and the DLC goes ham with the amount of other Square RPGs get represented.

Seconded. I'm pretty sure I've played all the Theatrhythm games at some point or another and they're all super fun, but even if Final Bar Line hadn't already secured its spot as the best one by having the most content and the most polished mechanics, it would've automatically snagged the top spot for having the Steel Titan theme from Live A Live as DLC.

 

[DBomb]

I've said this a lot recently, but for posterity: I think FF13 is terrible not just because it sucks as a play experience, but because it is trying to coast off the Final Fantasy brand while simultaneously being ashamed of being an RPG, which informs a lot of its terrible choices. This makes me not respect the game, so it is the worst mainline FF to me by default. (And even including the franchise as a whole, I think only the FF7 Reheat games beat it by being that curious kind of "anti-art" in the vein of Rise of Skywalker.)



I need to play WoFF properly; I got it a very long time ago and just got horribly distracted from it, a terrible fate that happens to a lot of actually good games in my collection.

I highly recommend Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. It does get very grindy if you're trying to get everything, but as a casual experience it's a wonderful trip through the musical history of FF, and the DLC goes ham with the amount of other Square RPGs get represented.

FF13 is just an all-around bad time. I haven't typically LOVED Final Fantasy since 9, but like with Mystic Quest, I would much rather play 10 and 12 a hundred times before touching this steaming turd of a game. Even looking at it fills me with a sort of dread.


I do hope you'll forgive me as I've long since forgotten how to separate parts of the post I'm quoting, but anyway... WoFF is a very fun game. It's what you might imagine a psuedo-Pokemon-style FF would be like. You catch monsters, you evolve monsters. Fun stuff. Making stacks is surprisingly fun as well. Mixing and matching monsters (or Mirages as they're known) for both Lilkin and Jiant Lann and Reynn (Whose forms you can switch between on the fly, with neither really having an advantage over the other in combat) is surprisingly addictive.

I kinda laughed when I first saw Theatrhythm previewed and I have long since regretted it because it looks fantastic. I just worry about how I'll do with such a game because I'm pretty bad at rhythm games in general.

Ooh, other Square RPGs? Any Rudra no Hihou, by chance? Because that's one of my favorite non-FF Square RPGs and I wish they would finally officially port it over here in some fashion.


I'd be genuinely surprised at the Live-a-Live shoutout if not for the remake coming out, but it's still awesome.

 

[NothPrime]

Oh hey, it's the 35th anniversary of Final Fantasy's first release in the US! God what a good series. I really need to replay some that I've only been through once. Final Fantasy V and VI in particular are really calling to me. But the urge to just default to playing more Final Fantasy XIV is very, very strong. Especially since I can just easily grind out some more relic weapons after getting the worst part of the grind done.

Also Final Fantasy XVI is like $25 on Amazon last I saw so fucking GET ON THAT if you have a PS5 and haven't played it yet.

Oh yeah there's also just a big Final Fantasy sale on steam right now too I think.

 

[Elkazor]

OG FFVII is my all-time favorite game. From it, I've gone on to play through the first 10 games in the series.

I've mentioned this a few times in various streams with Rosie before, but I'll tell the full funny story of how I was introduced to Final Fantasy to begin with.

So I was first introduced to Final Fantasy through Kingdom Hearts a few years after Kingdom Hearts II first came out. My sister bought Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 one day to try out. We ended up loving the games. My sisters were huge into anime at the time, but I wasn't that into anime myself. After being introduced to the Final Fantasy characters through Kingdom Hearts, my other sister wanted to see where Cloud and Sephiroth were from. So her friend had the OG Advent Children (it was the only version available at the time) and she came over to our house and showed it to us.

OG Advent Children was my very first Final Fantasy experience. I was 13 years old at the time.

My first impression of the film was that it was a Japanese Christian Propaganda film. Let me explain.

The Angel symbolism was rampant. When Sephiroth eventually shows up I figured he was a metaphor for the anti-christ with his whole "one wing" thing.

There was that part where the guy shoves a shiny ball into his arm and it shoots a giant beam into the sky that forms a bunch of occultish pentagram symbols and summons a giant beast with horns and dragon wings. My immediate thought was "OK so that guy just summoned satan."

There were all of those flashbacks to Aerith and Zack in the church. I figured "Ah, so this Aerith girl is clearly being portrayed as Cloud's guardian angel."

At the end, a baptism is just straight up performed. Handful of water on the head and everything. Also, a big red jaguar just shows up out of nowhere and starts talking about being one with life and the planet or something and my genuine thoughts, no joke, were "Hmmm that red jaguar must be a religious hallucination of God".

The version of Advent Children my sister's friend had had this other feature on the disk where it showed a montage of the OG game, and of course the first thing we did was laugh hysterically at the graphics.

Later my sister got my brother to borrow the OG game off of his friend. So she started playing it and got stuck at Corel Prison, and then promptly moved on from the game for years. She didn't beat it until she got it a few years ago on the Nintendo Switch and beat that version.

I became curious, bc at this point in my life I hadn't really gone back and revisited older games. I thought it would be a neat time capsule.
I also went in thinking "I'm excited to see the origins of all of the characters, including Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo!" And was also excited to see the moment when Cloud sticks the Buster Sword into the cliff. Oh, and also, I went in knowing full well about both the major end of disc one spoiler and the disc two spoiler.

I was immediately blown away at how grounded and deep the entire game was from the get-go compared to Advent Children. The tonal whiplash I got was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. The game was so mature and so real in terms of it's political commentaries. I played it for an hour and got right up to the Wall Market section in my first sitting. At that point I knew I'd fallen in love with the game.

Evidently, Advent Children made even less sense to me after beating the game.