The Final Fantasy Retrospective!

[Vlad!]

Final Fantasy XIII has arrived at my house, but as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to be putting it off for a while. However, I can feel its pull...so to assuage my fanboy guilt, I came up with an idea: the Final Fantasy Retrospective!

Each week on Sunday evening, I will post in this thread some thoughts about a Final Fantasy game. This will include all the numbered Final Fantasies (I through XII) along with Mystic Quest, Tactics, X-2, and possibly Dirge of Cerberus, depending on how the timing works out. These thoughts won't help anyone get in touch with any universal truths or anything like that; it will mostly be the same rambling quality as the stuff I post in the Video Games thread.

Why does this need its own thread? Well, if we have a good discussion going in the Video Games thread, I don't want to derail either the conversation or the posting schedule. Also, Final Fantasy isn't for everyone, even people who are interested in other games, so I wanted to put it off in its own little easily-ignorable corner.

Feel free to post your own comments or thoughts or reminisces in this thread as well; it's not here for me to speak and you to listen, it's here for us to converse.

I will get the ball rolling this Sunday--yes, tomorrow--with the original Final Fantasy!

[bloop]

I don't have any experience with II, III, XI, or XIII (although I hope to remedy that last one sometime).  VI remains my favorite of the series - very memorable well-written characters in that one.  The most interesting in terms of gameplay was probably XII, even though I didn't automate my characters like the game seems to want the player to do.

[Vlad!]

Final Fantasy VI is not only my favorite as well, but it's one of those special games that really defines for me why I play video games at all. It is one of a mere handful of games that, after playing through it, I immediately started over and played it from the beginning again.

I should also mention that I am going to skip Final Fantasy XI. It should by rights have been called Final Fantasy Online, because that's what it is. I was saddened to see that Final Fantasy XIV is going to be the same: an MMORPG. I've never played it, nor do I plan to.

(I'm also skipping all the portable Final Fantasies, including the Final Fantasy Legends GB games (which are properly part of the SaGa series anyway), Final Fantasy Adventure (part of the Seiken Densetsu/Secret of Mana series), the portable Tactics games, and Revenant Wings (which I have already discussed; impression is here and review is here). Spin-offs such as the Chocobo games and the Crystal Chronicles games will also not appear here.)

I liked XII and agree that it's interesting, though it felt like quite the departure. It will be interesting to see what mechanics XIII inherits from its immediate predecessor.

[bloop]

My brother tells me that Tactics for PSP is pretty much the definitive version of the game.  That's almost enough to get me to buy a PSP by itself.  Almost.

I remember going to a battle in Tactics unprepared, getting killed, and not being able to go back to level grind.  I became angry with the game, and didn't go back to it for another year.  I learned my lesson, and did much better the second time (using the frog trick to do my level grinding worked brilliantly).

[Vlad!]

My brother tells me that Tactics for PSP is pretty much the definitive version of the game.  That's almost enough to get me to buy a PSP by itself.  Almost.

Yeah, there's just a small handful of games for the PSP that make me go "huh...I sort of wish I had one", but War of the Lions is definitely one of them.

(The best translation error in the original PSX version is the battle where is says "Objective: Kill Dycedarg's Elder Brother". Dycedarg, of course, is the elder brother you're supposed to kill, but I got confused and killed Zalbag (also known as Douchebag) instead. Woopsies.)

[Vlad!]

Alright, welcome to the first installment of Final Fantasy Retrospective! Where better to begin than the beginning, right?

In the late 1980s, Squaresoft was struggling financially. In an effort to put themselves on the map, director Hironobu Sakaguchi tried to emulate the success of Enix's landmark RPG Dragon Quest. His tiny (by today's game development standards) team developed many of the set pieces of the series--and indeed of the genre--in this original offering. Borrowing from the aforementioned Dragon Quest, perennial nerd pastime Dungeons and Dragons, and a mishmash of world mythologies and religions, Sakaguchi and his cohort Akitoshi Kawazu crafted a vibrant world and a story befitting such a setting. Good vs. evil, light vs. dark, heroes vs. villains...it doesn't get any more classic than this.

Final Fantasy was actually not the first of the series I played, so when I first popped the cartridge into the NES, I found myself frustrated by many things I viewed as throwbacks, even though intellectually I realized that at the time the game was under development the more polished alternatives I had become used to were not yet created. I have to admit that at that time, I did not play through the game. I got past the second fiend--Kary, the fiend of fire--and then sort of gave up.

My second attempt at Final Fantasy involved emulating the original game on my computer. I'm not sure why I went the emulation route, but most likely either I had lost the cart or the NES had given up the ghost by that point. In any case, I got past the ice cave and once again put it down. I just found myself getting frustrated by what I viewed as primitive game mechanics and painfully difficult dungeons.

Finally, my sophomore year, I decided that this had gone on long enough. I was armed with a copy of Final Fantasy Origins for the Playstation, and although I wasn't actually armed with a Playstation (or more technically, we weren't armed with a TV), I had yet another emulator on my computer. I don't know if it was my grim determination or the slightly more polished interface, but I managed to actually beat the game this time around.

It is interesting now to compare this first offering to more modern ones. One mechanic that I often think about is the dungeons. With both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, the dungeons themselves were the real challenge. You would use up your healing items and spells just slogging through the multiple levels and repelling attacks at each turn. Nowadays dungeons are full of fairly weak and unthreatening monsters, and the challenge either comes from puzzles or from a big boss--probably with an accompanying overly-dramatic cutscene.

As I mentioned above, though, there are still plenty of similarities between this first installment and later entries. Even though each Final Fantasy generally takes place in its own world, separate from the others, Square like to put in little touchstones. Bahamut, the king of the dragons (taken from Dungeons and Dragons, along with his counterpart Tiamat) appears for the first time in the first game. He has appeared in every Final Fantasy save the second one. The airship--that scientifically improbable flying contrivance--has also shown up in every subsequent Final Fantasy as a mode of transportation. Sadly, our beloved Dr. Cid does not come on the scene until later.

It's also worth noting that Final Fantasy has seen more than its share of re-releases, ports, and remakes over the years. There have been no fewer than six US releases and a whopping ten Japanese ones! Along with the original version and the Playstation version I played, there was a release for the GBA called Dawn of Souls which contained some bonus dungeons, a release for the PSP, a release for the Wii VC, and a release for the iPhone/iTouch. Though Squeenix released FFI to the PSN last year in Japan, for some reason that particular incarnation of the game hasn't come stateside yet. Not that we need any more versions.

These days, Final Fantasy's story seems clichéd and outdated--the main characters have no names, personalities, or even lines of dialog!--but it will always be of historical interest, if nothing else. However, even though this wasn't the first Final Fantasy I played it definitely still has a special place in my heart. Whether it's some Apple fanboy sipping his frappuccino with one hand and battling his way through the volcano with the other or some college kid with a Playstation emulator or some dude on his Wii reliving the memories, these people are all connected to me as a kid putting that cartridge into the NES for the first time and starting the adventure that launched a franchise.

[RedcoatJones]

Interesting read on FF1. I'm not a gamer, now, but I have fond memories of playing FF1 on the NES with my brothers. Since there were 4 characters, it was one of the few games we could all play at once (I have 2 brothers) with each of us "controlling" a character's role and decisions and the 4th being a shared character.

[Vlad!]

Interesting read on FF1. I'm not a gamer, now, but I have fond memories of playing FF1 on the NES with my brothers. Since there were 4 characters, it was one of the few games we could all play at once (I have 2 brothers) with each of us "controlling" a character's role and decisions and the 4th being a shared character.

That's an interesting way of playing it! That sort of brings it back to the genre's roots with tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Final Fantasy VI actually had a "multiplayer" system that allowed you to assign character slots to different controllers, so for example controller 1 could control the first two characters in your party and controller 2 could control the second two. I don't think it was multi-tap enabled, so you couldn't have each character controlled by a different person.

This probably would have worked out for the earlier FF games, but FFVI of course used the Active-Time Battle system which I'll cover when we get up to Final Fantasy IV. It got a little hectic with two people controlling an active-time battle. It was more of a gimmick than anything else, and the system was quietly scrapped and never seen again.

[NinjaRob17]

That's an interesting way of playing it! That sort of brings it back to the genre's roots with tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Final Fantasy VI actually had a "multiplayer" system that allowed you to assign character slots to different controllers, so for example controller 1 could control the first two characters in your party and controller 2 could control the second two. I don't think it was multi-tap enabled, so you couldn't have each character controlled by a different person.

This probably would have worked out for the earlier FF games, but FFVI of course used the Active-Time Battle system which I'll cover when we get up to Final Fantasy IV. It got a little hectic with two people controlling an active-time battle. It was more of a gimmick than anything else, and the system was quietly scrapped and never seen again.

Actually, they had this in FFIX as well.

[Vlad!]

Actually, they had this in FFIX as well.

Oh, did they? Interesting.

For some reason I don't remember too much about the gameplay of IX; I'll probably have to spend a couple hours playing it before I can write its article. These early games--FFI through FFVI--I've played several times. The later games--FFX, X-2, and XII--I've played fairly recently. But VII, VIII, IX, and Tactics are all sort of vague blurs and I'll have to refresh my memory before I can speak about them.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out!

[RedcoatJones]

So I gave in and downloaded a port of FF1 for my cell. Having a blast reliving my childhood (solo this time!)

[Vlad!]

So I gave in and downloaded a port of FF1 for my cell. Having a blast reliving my childhood (solo this time!)

Do you have an iPhone? As far as I know, the iPhone is the only cell that has an official FFI port in the US.

[Vlad!]

Now, I think it's pretty obvious to all of us that saying Square Enix are whoring out the Final Fantasy name is like saying Tiger Woods had an affair. For every Bill Watterson who believes in the purity of art for art's sake there's at least two Jim Davises who will gladly stamp his art on a coffee mug or wall poster if it will make a buck. However, one thing I appreciate about the Final Fantasy series is that Square have never relied on a formula. With every new installment in the mainline series it is obvious that Square are not content to sit on their laurels while milking their franchise. They may milk it, sure, but at least they're working on it.

This is never more evident than in the divide between Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II.

Square released the second entry out of the gate almost exactly a year after the first (and nearly two years before Nintendo of America would publish the first Final Fantasy here in North America). What amazes me is the radical changes between the two games.

The first thing to notice is that, unlike the nameless and speechless warriors of light in the first one, Final Fantasy II has actual characters. I'm not sure if Sakaguchi and Kawazu felt that they couldn't properly tell the story they wanted with generic main characters or if it was an effort to differentiate itself from rival series Dragon Quest (where the main character to this day remains nameless and more or less speechless), but either way it was a radical shift.

The other big change is completely ditching the experience point system in favor of what I call an on-demand stat growth model. In the original, your characters have a level, and this level grows by gaining experience points from battle. At each level progression, your character's stats improve and he or she gains access to a new series of spells. In II, stats grow as they're used. A character who takes a lot of hits will see HP and defense improve, while a character who casts a lot of spells will see MP and magic attack improve. This system also adds weapon and spell affinities, and as your characters use their weapons and cast their spells these affinities increase. This system is generally called the SaGa system because Square went on to use it in the SaGa series of games (and it has never returned to the Final Fantasy franchise).

There are even more changes, including a dynamic party (members can join and leave, though only due to plot-related events), the ability to have pseudo "conversations" with NPCs by asking them about certain key concepts or showing them items, and of course the introduction of two series staples: Cid and Chobobos. Sometimes it's the little changes which make all the difference, but in this case I think it's the character-driven story and the levelling system which are the most significant.

My first experience with II was on the same disc as my last experience with I: Final Fantasy Origins. You see, II was never released stateside. Since there was such a big lapse between when Square released FFI in Japan and when NOA picked it up and localized it for North America that by the time II was in the pipeline, Final Fantasy IV for the Super NES was set to drop in Japan [1]. The "Final Fantasy 2" that we got was actually Final Fantasy IV rebranded (when I use Roman numerals I am referring to the original numbering, and when I use Arabic numerals I am referring to the American renumbering). Thus, unless I wanted to play a fan translation on an emulator I had no opportunity to play II before Origins came out.

The reason I point this out is because Final Fantasy II was something of a disappointment, but since I never had the experience of playing it even close to its original context then this opinion is highly suspect. It's not that the game is bad, but its major flaw is in fact its innovative leveling system. While superficially it seems more like how real humans actually gain skills and abilities, its implementation is fundamentally broken. It would be interesting to play through the game with a more traditional experience-based system to see how it stands up absent its main Achilles' heel.

The other thing that I find fascinating is that Final Fantasy II contains many of the hallmarks of the Western RPG, which by that point was already coming into its own through the likes of Richard Garriott's Ultima series. Several of the new features in II (including conversation trees with NPCs and skill-based progression) have become hallmarks of our own games. I suspect this isn't a case of West stealing from East as much as both sides stealing from old-school adventure games...but I was still of single-digit age when all this was occurring so I definitely don't claim to be an expert in the who-did-what-first game.

To me, the lasting contribution of Final Fantasy II is  not in what it was but in what it inspired. The world of Final Fantasy II was a connected world, a political world, a world more reminiscent of the Renaissance than of Final Fantasy I's Dark Ages. The characters had names and faces and personalities rather than acting as simple player avatars. The console RPG had already begun to lose its role-playing aspects and take on a completely different life.

[1] It is commonly cited that Final Fantasy II was not released in the US because the Japanese thought it would be too hard for American gamers, but as far as I know that was not the reason we never saw a release. Square were just tired of playing catchup in the US.

[RedcoatJones]

Do you have an iPhone? As far as I know, the iPhone is the only cell that has an official FFI port in the US.

Nope. An old Motorola razor with T-Mobile. I just happened to see while browsing the new games to download list seeking a good timewaster. It's done by Namco.

[Vlad!]

Looks like it was *just* released this month.

Judging by the screenshots, it's a version of the Wonderswan Color/PSX port designed for vertically-oriented screens. A version like this has been out in Japan for mobile phones for several years now, so I suspect this is just that release with the English script inserted.

[Vlad!]

It's interesting to look at the level of party customization between the first and second Final Fantasy installments. The first allowed the player to customize the party at the beginning of the game by choosing what four character classes to use. The second offered no customization at the beginning and a set party, but because of the innovative  (broken, but innovative) level system, each party grew and customized itself. You want a mage? Have him or her use a lot of magic. Want a tank? Put on some armor and take hits like a man.

I imagine that Sakaguchi and co. had plenty of brainstorming sessions around how to provide real-time customization without relying on a stat progression system that works in the background and is most effective when you abuse it by having your characters attack each-other. And what they came up with was the Final Fantasy III job system.

First, a bit of background. FFIII came out a mere year and a half after FFII. This meant that it suffered the same problems as II from a Western perspective: Final Fantasy III came out in Japan before Western gamers had seen any game from the series. With the new hotness of the SNES on the horizon, it just didn't seem economical to release these games here in the US.

Unlike II which saw a stateside release in Origins (and again on the GBA and again on the iPhone and again on the VC and...), our first and only experience with FFIII was its release for the Nintendo DS in 2007. I believe the reason for this is that Square had intended to port FFIII to the Wonderswan Color as they did with I and II, but the project was canceled. Eventually Nintendo convinced the newly-formed SquareEnix company to make Final Fantasy III a title for their Nintendo DS console, which at that point was still occasionally derided as a gimmick system. Thus, I believe Final Fantasy III is actually the least-released Final Fantasy of the Nintendo era.

(It's also worth noting that Matrix Software did the development work. I've been trying to follow their projects closely ever since, as they seem to have plenty of promise. Square seem comfortable letting other developers do the ports of their games to other systems, though in the case of III Square's own designers and directors worked with the Matrix team to ensure a quality experience.)

Though I haven't played through the original, I do know that there were some significant changes between it and the DS version. For instance, in the latter release the characters are given names, personalities, and stories. In the original, they are blank slates, à la Final Fantasy I. Hence the opening comments on customization: with the system they introduced in FFIII, Square offer the best of both worlds.

The job system is interesting for many reasons. It is certainly a departure from the RPG roots, as most tabletop RPGs don't allow class changes in midstream (or if they do, it's a one-time epochal event, as in FFI). But more than that, it's an acknowledgement that game mechanics are what provides the fun.

With FFII, the idea behind the leveling system meant that the characters would shape themselves to the user's style of play. This seems like a tactic to get the game out of the way of the story: the player just plays through and the game naturally adapts itself. Granted, this isn't how it worked in practice, but the intention was there. So when FFIII took almost the exact opposite path by allowing unprecedented levels of control over the characters and their skills, it was an affirmation that RPGs weren't going to become little more than interactive novels. There's a game here for you to play.

I can't stress enough that this is not the same situation as the FFI and FFII remakes. FFIII DS is truly a different game. The classes have been rebalanced, the story expanded, the characters given names, personalities, and lines of dialog; I'm sure there are even more differences that I would know if I had played through the original (I did play some of the fan translation a while back, but not a significant amount).

I actually suspect that Squeenix were taking advantage of the fact that many fewer people had experienced FFIII than its predecessors. It's kind of odd that the first two would have so much time in the limelight while the third--certainly no worse of a game!--has languished in relative obscurity. However, I can't complain, because FFIII DS is (while undoubtedly annoying purists who were fans of the original) a most excellent game, worthy of your attention.

The original FFIII came out for the Wii Virtual Console in Japan last year. I have a slight hope that it will make an appearance here as well, though since that would require Square to translate it I'm guessing they'll pass. Still, FFIII is not only a worthwhile game in itself, it is, as we will see, an important stepping stone leading to bigger and better things in the future.

Next week: Final Fantasy on the Super Nintendo! Sixteen bits of pure awesome!

[Vlad!]

I'll be posting my FFIV retrospective later on, but while I was doing the research for my Final Fantasy V one I realized I was remiss in not mentioning that Final Fantasy III also introduced the Moogle into Final Fantasy canon. Since I hadn't played the original III, I assumed the moogles in the DS version were retconned in. I always just assumed that they made their first appearance in Final Fantasy V. Learn something new every day, I guess!

(Also, moogles are cute.)

[Vlad!]

I mentioned that the original Final Fantasy was not actually my first experience with the franchise. No, my first experience was actually Final Fantasy IV, though I didn't know it at the time.

As I mentioned in my FFII review, Square were playing catchup in the US, courtesy of Nintendo of America. However, they were faced with a conundrum: continue the series as originally released--on a nearly three-year delay--or jump into the future in one fell swoop. They chose the latter, releasing Final Fantasy IV (for the SNES!) only a few months after its Japanese release. However, this left them with yet another problem: US gamers, understandably, would be confused if Final Fantasy IV followed Final Fantasy. Since clearly nobody in the US ever communicated with Japan, they decided to rename the US release to Final Fantasy 2 (as if that strategy has ever worked out well).

Unlike the previous Western offering, Square also decided to translate and publish the game themselves. This was before the time of Ted Woolsey and during the era of intense NOA censorship, so the translation is widely regarded as a failure (including by Square themselves). In addition, the 8 megabit cartridge did not have enough memory to contain a full localization. A pervasive rumor is that the game was also "dumbed down" for the American audience. This is possible, though it's hard to tell which changes were due to a lack of space versus a dim view of the Western gamer.

In any case, this is why I didn't know that I was playing FFIV: because as far as I knew the game my brother and I had borrowed from my dad's co-worker was the second of the series.

A few years later, when coming back from a trip to the mountains, we stopped by a pawn shop (pawn shops, of course, being one of our favorite venues for picking up video games on the cheap. These shops, at least back then, weren't savvy enough to understand that different games might have vastly different values. They were generally priced like books: seven bucks for a game). My brother saw Final Fantasy 2 and said "hey, isn't that the game that you liked?", and I was like, "yeah!", so we grabbed it. (And paid for it. This isn't a criminal confession).

When we got home, I was immediately entranced. One of the things that FFIV does that I think is really cool is that when you start it up, it checks to see if you have any save files. If not, it goes straight into the game. For some reason this secondhand copy had no saves, so after putting the cartridge in and flipping the power switch, the Red Wings' theme started right up, and I was into it [1]. I played straight through to Mount Ordeals before my parents came up to make sure we weren't dead and tell us to come down for dinner.

I had played a lot of games before, but gaming was mostly something to do when hanging out with my brother, and he was always better than I was at it. But this was different: the game practically consumed my consciousness, leaving me rapt. I have often thought that when gaming, much of my subconscious desire is really to recreate this transcendental experience.

FFIV, as with FFII and indeed with all Final Fantasy games past IV except perhaps XI, has definite characters. It also gives each character definite jobs which the player can't change. This is really indicates the game's driving force, which is its characters. The first and third Final Fantasies didn't even care enough about its protagonists to give them names, and the second was driven more by plot than by character. But IV's colorful cast is definitely what stands out about that game. Indeed, though I may incur the wrath of old-school gamers by saying this, I think Final Fantasy IV is the first truly complete Final Fantasy. Its predecessors may have been games, but FFIV was an experience.

Like the original, Final Fantasy IV has seen a number of releases. Square first got the remake religion in '97 (we will learn why in a few weeks, though you can probably guess if you're familiar at all with the series), so of course the venerable PlayStation saw a port. This port, unlike Origins, isn't particularly great. The first worthwhile port we got in the US was the Gameboy Advance version, though by that point I had played a fan translation of the original Japanese release and knew how the game was "really supposed" to be.

In my mind, though, the definitive re-release was Matrix Software's port to the NDS. It's this port which to me most accurately recaptures the magic I felt the first time I put that SNES cartridge in the Super Nintendo. I would love to go on about the NDS remake, but I've already discussed it in such detail that if you really want to read over two thousand more of my words then you can just go back and read those.

Final Fantasy IV has its share of wonkiness and awkwardness, especially in the original release. There are better games--and even better Final Fantasies--but this one will always have a special place in my heart.

[1] Just so we're on the same page, in the game the Red Wings are an airship squadron. I am not referring to Detroit's professional hockey team.

[Vlad!]

Once again I am forced to post an addendum, because I got so caught up in talking about how much I love Final Fantasy IV and giving quirky stories from my childhood that I forgot to include what is one of its most enduring contributions, gameplay-wise: the active-time battle (ATB) system, which I alluded to earlier. In previous installments, and indeed in pretty much all roleplaying games up until this point, battle was turn-based. Characters and enemies alike were assigned a turn based on their speed and actions could only be performed on one's turn. The ATB, by contrast, gave each character and enemy a gauge which filled at a rate determined by their speed. Once the gauge filled, the character could take an action regardless of what else was going on. The first time you take a sword to the face while sitting there trying to figure out what your character should do, you realize that the gloves have come off and now you have to think on your feet.

I remember that none other than certifiably insane science fiction author Orson Scott Card wrote an intro to some video game book that my brother and I had, and he mentioned that he loved FFVI but he was getting too old for active-time battle systems. They can certainly feel like the rug is coming out from under you if you're not prepared for them, but anyone who's played games that require real speed, skill, and reflexes will still scoff at the idea that the ATB is actually in any way a challenge. Sure, dudes, you laugh, but when you fight the Demon Wall then you might have a different opinion...

(Yes, even in these little supplemental posts you can't escape random stories of my youth).

[Vlad!]

So if you read my Final Fantasy II review, you saw the following quote, from the footnote:

It is commonly cited that Final Fantasy II was not released in the US because the Japanese thought it would be too hard for American gamers, but as far as I know that was not the reason we never saw a release.

Furthermore, in my Final Fantasy IV review last week, I said:

It is rumored that the game was also "dumbed down" for the American audience. This is possible, though it's hard to tell which changes were driven by lack of space versus a dim view of the Western gamer.

Here I'm trying to buck conventional wisdom by giving Square the benefit of the doubt. However, there's one major reason why the conventional wisdom is conventional: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

While the Final Fantasy team (led, as you might recall, by Hironobu Sakaguchi and with Takashi Tokita standing in for Akitoshi Kawazu) were working on Final Fantasy IV, the SaGa team (who developed the Game Boy titles released as Final Fantasy Legends here in the US) were also at work on a game for the SNES. Though they developed this game in Japan (I don't think Square's infamous US development offices had opened yet), Square targeted the game specifically at US gamers in the hopes that a simplified, accessible game would prompt mainstream adoption of the console RPG genre.

While it's possible that scorn of Western gamers is not responsible for the non-appearance of Final Fantasy II and the dumbing down of the US release of Final Fantasy IV, when I look at FFMQ it's hard to get around the appearance that Square thought we were a bunch of hooting gibbons.

Mystic Quest is not only the black sheep of the series but is quite possibly actually a llama. Even so, it is certainly interesting from an historical perspective. The SaGa team created the game, but they Final Fantasy-ized it. They also put the game on rails, did away with the equipment system, removed the party system in favor of a single AI-controlled ally, removed all random battles, and replaced magic points with per-category spell charges. This leads to a game that is part Final Fantasy (the leveling system, weapons that don't deteriorate), part SaGa (first-person battles, sprite design) and part freak mutant.

(Interestingly, we can see even some of its more reviled features in other games. Robotrek and Illusion of Gaia use a similar map system, the early Dragon Quest games use a similar party system, many action RPGs use a similar equipment system, the Lufia games have similarly done away with random battles, and the magic system is sort of a dumbed-down version of the original Final Fantasy's. It's just that by combining these features and slapping the Final Fantasy name on the end product they ended up making something unimpressive.)

I actually played FFMQ on the SNES; not when it came out (I was nine, and I'm not sure my family even had an SNES at that point), but perhaps about five years later. The friend I borrowed the cart from had warned me that it wasn't exactly up to the caliber of the mainline series, so given that my expectations were suitably lowered, I actually liked the game. The jumping amused me (when your character is wandering through towns and dungeons he can jump forward two tiles), and the game overall provided a nice little diversion. Not having had to pay money for it certainly helped, I'm sure.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest suffers from the same problem that most of the Final Fantasy spinoff games do: it's a fair enough game on its own, but it just doesn't live up to the vaunted Final Fantasy name. Had it been released under a humbler moniker (such as perhaps simply Mystic Quest), it would have gone down in history as an adequate but ultimately generic and uninspiring RPG. It's only the game's distinguished lineage that causes critics and enthusiasts alike to heap such hate upon it.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the tragedy that is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is that the fundamental mechanics of the genre remain unchanged, and thus Square completely failed at their strategy. Rather than looking at the sort of game that Western gamers liked and taking elements from that, they kept the fundamentally Japanese console roleplaying game concept and made it less difficult without altering any of its underpinnings. In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that Western gamers didn't want an easier game; they wanted a different game, or specifically a different aesthetic. We will see in a few weeks how Square learned from this mistake, what it gained them, and what it cost them.

[Vlad!]

As pretty much everyone here knows, I love quotations. I believe a conversation can strike at a thing's essence as fast or faster than a description. One of my favorite quotations about Final Fantasy V comes from "Pitchfork" Pat's epic HG101 FFV review:

A week or so I was talking about this with Polly, who is not a Final Fantasy V fan. "So what if the plot is silly," I told her. "It's still a pretty fun game."

"Pat," she answered. "A little kid running around with a cereal bowl on his head is silly. Final Fantasy V's story is just retarded."

"WHAT?" I asked. "WHAT WAS THAT? I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS JOB SYSTEM."

Also, my former roommate recently played through FFV again, and afterward we had this conversation:

Me: FFV has a pretty lame story and the final boss is a tree, but I still like it a lot just because of the depth of gameplay. It also has some great music.

Him: FFV's story was pretty weak, but I found the ending to be a bit bittersweet. You are correct about its great gameplay and excellent soundtrack. And a correction: The final boss is an EVIL tree.

Interestingly, apparently Hironobu Sakaguchi considers Final Fantasy V his favorite of the Nintendo-era Final Fantasies. You know that name, right? The guy who freaking created Final Fantasy?

Final Fantasy IV is in many ways reminiscent of Final Fantasy II: the characters all have names and personalities, there are many characters even though you have no real control over who is in your party at every given time, and the story takes a back seat to the personalities of your party members.

In the same way, Final Fantasy V is remarkably similar to Final Fantasy III. You have four and only four playable characters, without the revolving door your party seems to have in II and IV. The story still takes a backseat, but this time to the game mechanics. Also, and not incidentally, III introduced the Final Fantasy job system and V perfected it.

Square released Final Fantasy V just a year and a half after Final Fantasy IV. It was, again like III, never released in the US until Squeenix started getting remake-happy in the late 90s/early 00s. My first experience with the game was playing a fan-translated version on an emulator. I believe that FFV was actually the first game to be fully translated by amateurs and hobbyists, which just goes to show how wrong Square was in assuming that the Western world didn't want a game like that. Apparently the Playstation port not only suffers from the Mode 7 bugs and slow battle loading that plague the other PSX releases experienced but also has one of the worst localizations Square has ever produced--yes, worse even than the much-maligned original Final Fantasy 2 translation. The only worthy remake seems to have been the GBA port released in 2005.

In any case, as I mentioned above the core of the game is really the job system. Much like III, characters can switch jobs at any time. FFV removes the penalty for switching jobs, encouraging players to swap around willy-nilly if so desired. In V, each job continues to teach skills as a character earns job points. Skills include actions (such as the thief's Steal and the ninja's Throw), stat buffs (monks get more HP), equipment abilities (fighters can wear heavy helmets and armor), or even effects which appear outside of battle (elementalists can walk on damage tiles safely). As you find more of the crystals, more jobs become available.

The strategy really comes in how to spread the job points you get, especially because once you've mastered a job you get special benefits. Do you spend the time to master one job, or spend the same amount of time learning lots of different skills from multiple jobs? Each choice has its advantages and disadvantages, and the fun really comes from customizing the characters in your own way.

The other feature of Final Fantasy V which sticks out to me is the breadth of the world. Actually, I should say "worlds", since there are multiple (much like Final Fantasy IV, which allows you to explore the underworld and the moon as well as the traditional overworld map). You also have many different modes of transportation, at least as many as in IV, including a submarine (which opens up yet another world of sorts as you explore the briny deep).

Final Fantasy V is also quite possibly the funniest Final Fantasy. I think the writers really knew how ridiculous the story was, and I suspect the story is even intentionally ridiculous at times simply because it's not important. I appreciate how self-aware the dialog is, in that the characters almost seem to laugh at themselves sometimes. There's something to be said for a game that makes the player laugh.

All in all, I really do like Final Fantasy V a lot. All the SNES Final Fantasies (um, excluding Mystic Quest) are really excellent games, as we'll see next time. I don't really agree with Sakaguchi-san about FFV being the best, but it's still very good. I realize that I've done my share of complaining about Squeenix coming out with remake after remake, but if Matrix Software developed a DS version of FFV, I would be happy on the inside.

[Vlad!]

How does one go about creating a work of greatness? Obviously I have no idea or else I would have done it already, but it seems like it involves both skill and serendipity. One-hit wonders are heavier on the serendipity, while those artists and creators who turn everything they touch to gold are heavier on the skill. I think the Final Fantasy series, especially the first half of the franchise, provides insight into this process. You see, the question I have to ask upon seeing Final Fantasy VI is "where did that come from?".

Final Fantasy VI is in many ways different from its predecessors. Its setting is a much more vibrant and connected world and exchanges the medieval feel of the previous games for a world that seems like the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. Its graphics are a huge step up from its predecessors, presaging the mastery of the visual arts that Square is now known for. As a game, its depth and complexity meet the high bar set by Final Fantasy V. In a way, it represents the strengths of its predecessors aggregated in a single game.

And its characters are incredible. I put this in a new paragraph so you'd see it even if you're skimming, which you probably are because I anticipate this going on for another thousand words or so.

The colorful, zany troupe of characters has become almost a hallmark of the RPG genre, but remember our setting. Only three of the previous five main-line Final Fantasies even had what we would consider characters at all. Though Final Fantasy IV had a decently large cast, they came and went without so much as a by-your-leave. The story drove the characters, rather than the other way around. So when Final Fantasy VI allowed the player to form and re-form parties at will from an unprecedented fourteen characters, that was a big deal.

Back when I was a young(er) lad, I had a short-lived subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly, or EGM (the subscription was short-lived because it mostly covered games that I didn't care about). I remember reading the article on Final Fantasy VI. The author gushed on and on about this game, and he ended his review with a quote along the following lines: "A game like this comes around only once in a blue moon. I'll see you in line at the store to buy this game!"[1].

It's easy for me to get caught up in writing and lose the forest for the trees, so let me set this straight: not only is Final Fantasy VI my favorite of the entire series, I think it's one of the best video games ever released.

Like its predecessor Final Fantasy IV, Square changed FFVI's number for the US release, so I first met the game as Final Fantasy 3. The other interesting tidbit about its US release is that it's the first and last real Final Fantasy game that localization guru Ted Woolsey worked on (he also worked on Final Fantasy Legends III, which as we know is really part of the SaGa series). Though people sometimes make fun of the translation for some of its odd phrasings, Woolsey did the entire translation over the course of a month by himself and under the constraints of Nintendo of America's censorship guidelines. Honestly, I think the result is quite memorable. For instance, while the original Japanese script contains the unremarkable line "you son of a bitch", Woolsey translated it as "you son of a submariner", which stands alongside "you sthingyy bard" as a classic Bowdlerized Final Fantasy insult.

(I have heard that the much-maligned Final Fantasy IV script was given to Woolsey soon after he joined Square, who gave him instructions to help keep them from repeating its travesty. The original Woolsey translation has some rough spots, but even though he didn't really work on many games, his legacy as not just a translator but a localizer has remained intact.)

So going back to my opening comments on greatness, I think that creating a game as fantastic and epochal as Final Fantasy VI required both skill and luck. By 1994, the Final Fantasy series had five numbered releases and several ancillary hangers-on under its belt. Square had also been busy releasing games in the SaGa series, as well as the burgeoning Seiken Densetsu series (you may know Seiken Densetsu 2 as Secret of Mana). Final Fantasy VI was not a one-hit wonder or a flash in the pan by any stretch of the imagination, since just looking at a list of Squaresoft releases around that time period reads like a roll-call of well-revered classics. The SaGa series had branched off into the Romancing SaGa games; I've only played the third one, but it was quite excellent. The aforementioned Secret of Mana is another one of my favorite games for the SNES; its cover art does a good job of conveying its scope and artistry. Soon after creating FFVI Square would go on to release the quirky and, unfortunately, Japan-only Live a Live (I've played a translation, and it's excellent). They also created Front Mission, Chrono Trigger, Bahamut Lagoon in the couple of years after Final Fantasy VI's release, all three of which also number among my favorite games of all time. Sadly, many of these games never made it over here during this golden age; some like Final Fantasy V and Front Mission came over later, while others such as Bahamut Lagoon, Treasure Hunter G, and Rudra no Hihou seem destined to fade into obscurity.

Um, where was I? Oh, yes, FFVI's greatness. Well, it's obvious that Square had developed a mastery of their art and took every opportunity to prove it, but was that enough? It is certainly the case that without the stirring Uematsu soundtrack, the Amano character design, or then-newbie Yoshinori Kitase's direction the game would not be what it is, but even though the games I listed above are all very well-done games, there's just something special about Final Fantasy VI. Maybe it's just me and my nostalgia/fanboyism, but it seems to me that it took at least a little push from serendipity as well to make the game what it is.

This brings me back to the characters. More so than any other installment in the series, I feel like Final Fantasy VI is a story about people I care about. If these video games were movies, Final Fantasy IV would be an epic adventure story with all the characters you would expect an epic adventure story to have, Final Fantasy V would be a movie that's technically incredible but without much substance (I feel strangely compelled to mention James Cameron's name here), and Final Fantasy VI would be the delightful ensemble romp that manages to get serious in the right places without becoming melodramatic just by using characters and dialog as precisely and masterfully as the previous one used camera angles and lighting.

Not only does Final Fantasy VI offer nuanced and well-developed main characters, but the writers also went to great lengths to create memorable side characters and amazingly-written villains. I think the confrontation before the final showdown is truly one of the most enduring moments in RPG history: a group of heroes trying to reason with an adversary so twisted and insane while at the same time devilishly clever that he's reminiscent of Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Hannibal Lecter.

I think this also shows that FFVI is a turning point for the entire series. FFIV and FFV tried to have their share of serious, poignant moments, but while IV succeeded occasionally, V failed completely. FFVI, by contrast, avoids the ham-fisted drama of these previous installments by creating emotion subtly and organically through the characters. While this pendulum's destination is as undesirable as its origin, FFVI occupies the sweet spot that lets it shine so brilliantly.

I realize that I haven't said a lot about the game, so I'll give you the quick overview: the graphics are stupendously improved, the battle system is incredibly solid, the soundtrack is amazing and stretches the DSP on the SNES to its absolute limits, and the skill system is reminiscent of FFIV, but with an intriguing twist which deserves further exploration.

I've mentioned the idea of blank slate characters before, and the idea is really embodied in the characters of FFIII: the player determines everything from the character name to its skills and stats. But there's a reason that games like FFIII and FFV have only four characters and a static party: when your party members are so interchangeable that you're looking for Eli Whitney's name in the end credits, why would you use one over the other? Well, in FFVI each character has a set class, and you can't change this class (like in FFIV). However, magic is not tied to the class (like FFV). Thus, you can have the sort of aberration where a fighter or a samurai somehow knows high-level magic. However, the same things that teach you magic also bump your stats up. Thus, your physical attackers will want to boost their attack, defense, and hit points while your magic users will be boosting their magic attack and magic points while learning spells.

This is the FFVI system's brilliance: while you might have some players who through stupidity or belligerence are bound and determined to teach Flare and Meltdown to their pugilist, the game design gently encourages the player to differentiate and specialize their characters just because it's in their own best interest to do so!

(If the system has a flaw it's this same subtlety, because "I don't need no stinkin' manual" types will just blaze right through and teach everything to everyone and then wonder why their high-level fighters take hits like a little schoolgirl. The start of the SNES era also marked a decline in the difficulty of the games, though, so even the most hard-headed player should at least not find himself stuck partway through the game due to his own obstinate ignorance.)

I'll also say a brief bit about the graphics. There was a generation of gamers who liked to sneer at the "old-school" 2-d sprite-based games. Thankfully I think this wave is starting to pass since great 2-d games continue to be released on the DS, Internet, and mobile phone platforms. And while there are some scenes in FFVI which could unquestionably have benefited from more animation, it's not the 2-d that was holding the game back so much as the lack of storage space. Even within the constraints of a 24-megabit SNES cartridge [2], Square managed to do some incredible things in 2-d. Now that the NDS supports 1024 megabit cartridges we've seen some truly amazing sprite-based graphics, which I think for the most part have silenced the haters.

Final Fantasy VI is in my mind the pinnacle of the series and the truly exemplary pure JRPG that--despite the genre's transgressions in recent years--still gives me hope and keeps me playing these games. There are other wonderful titles produced by Square in this era, but Final Fantasy VI is, as the EGM reviewer so rightly said over a decade and a half ago, one of those special games that really makes you stop and take notice.

I am sorry that this one wound up being so long...it's over twice as long as my retrospective on the original Final Fantasy! Next week's will be about as long, and then the length will start going down again. Speaking of next week, look forward to Final Fantasy...in three dimensions!

[1] I'm reasonably certain that this is EGM issue #63 (October 1994), but for the life of me I can't find a copy of the article to verify if my memory is even remotely correct...if one of you intrepid phorumers can find me a copy of the article, I will award you two thousand five hundred and forty-eight imaginary points.

[2] 24 megabits equals three megabytes. Think on that when you're inserting your second 8.4 gigabyte Final Fantasy XIII DVD into your X-Box.

[bloop]

Back when I was a young(er) lad, I had a short-lived subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly, or EGM (the subscription was short-lived because it mostly covered games that I didn't care about). I remember reading the article on Final Fantasy VI. The author gushed on and on about this game, and he ended his review with a quote along the following lines: "A game like this comes around only once in a blue moon. I'll see you in line at the store to buy this game!"[1].

I remember it saying something along the lines of "Sell the house.  Sell the kids.  Buy this game!"  And, of course, I did.

I taught everyone everything magic (well, everyone who could be taught), and I really didn't see a downside to that.  Vanish + X-Zone (& reflect if necessary) came especially handy.

[Vlad!]

I taught everyone everything magic (well, everyone who could be taught), and I really didn't see a downside to that.  Vanish + X-Zone (& reflect if necessary) came especially handy.

That was actually a bug! It was sorta-fixed in the GBA version (Vanish no longer overrides the immune-to-death bit, but it does still bypass some other status checks, allowing weird behavior such as casting Arise/Life2 on Vanished but not dead allies for a full heal).

The downside to teaching all magics to all characters is that, unlike in the previous Final Fantasies, most of your stats do not naturally grow on level up. Instead, your stats will only increase if you have magicite equipped to increase those stats. This means that if you are spending time teaching Sabin or Shadow stuff like Cureaga/Cure3, you're going to be increasing their magic stats instead of stats that actually matter to characters who spend most of the time headbutting enemies into submission. Thus, you're going to need either better equipment or higher levels (or possibly cheaper tactics if you're exploiting the Vanish/Doom bug) to finish the game.

[bloop]

Yeah, I never noticed it getting hard by teaching everyone everything as it requires raising levels pretty high to even achieve that.  Honestly, I didn't even pay attention to the stats of my characters when I played through the game in the mid 90s.  I was just concerned that I made sure to get Shadow off the damn island, and that Cid lived to give me a happier story.

[Vlad!]

and that Cid lived to give me a happier story.

Although I like it that you can save Cid, honestly if you do then you miss one of the best scenes in the game. Lots of people say the ending to disc one of FFVII is the most emotional moment in gaming they've experienced, but for me I find it way too heavy-handed; it really did nothing to me. But when Celes thought that she was the last person left alive and was standing atop the cliff contemplating suicide, I had to blink tears from my eyes.

[bloop]

Yeah, the first time I played through, I didn't even know that you could keep Cid alive.

"A rotten fish.  Oh well, won't let me put it back.  *feeds Cid*"

[NinjaRob17]

So, I'm deciding to go through Final Fantasy I-VI since I've never played any of them. (Final Fantasy's beaten: VII, IX, X, XII, Tactics, Mystic Quest) I've barely started on Final Fantasy I, but I'm determined to do this. I feel like I'm missing out on a big chunk of gaming history by having not played these. So Vlad!, you've inspired me to do this (that and watching that Final Fantasy marathon).

[Vlad!]

Sweet! I'm glad you're giving this a shot. I'm also amused that you've beaten Mystic Quest but none of the other SNES-era Final Fantasies.

While the GBA versions of the oldschool FF games generally map pretty well to the originals, the DS versions do not. I love both FFIII and FFIV DS, but if you're wanting to experience gaming history then playing the original FFIII translated via an emulator and playing FFVI either as a fan translation or on the GBA might be the way to go.

[Vlad!]

I need to note that this review contains spoilers. I try really hard to keep my reviews spoiler-free, but I can't really talk about this game without talking about its plot. Consider yourself warned.

With Final Fantasy VI, Square created a masterpiece. We have already established that one of the things the series excels in is changing and reinventing itself with each release. The change from 8- to 16-bit brought about some incredible changes, leading to three of the strongest games in the series. But now Sakaguchi and co. had to make a tough decision: which of the upcoming next-gen platforms would prove itself worthy of bearing the next Final Fantasy?

Square had been pretty loyal to Nintendo through FFVI, releasing games on the NES, the SNES, and the Game Boy. And as mentioned in my last review, Square's mastery of the 2-d RPG during that time period is legendary. But it seemed obvious to Square that the future was in three dimensions.

The time for 3-d console gaming had come. Given the company's previous exclusive relationship with Nintendo the N64 seemed like a shoo-in for their next-generation début. But somewhere around this time, Square got a new religion. They began worshiping at the church of the full-motion video.

A full-motion video (FMV) scene is different from an in-engine scene in that it is entirely pre-rendered. This allows the developers to deliver a far more detailed scene than real-time rendering can produce, but the downside is that the player has no control over what's happening. We have a word for a game that's comprised entirely of full-motion video; it's called a "movie".

Besides the lack of interactivity, FMV takes up a lot of space--space that even a 512-megabit Nintendo 64 cartridge doesn't have. However, Sony was also testing the waters with a new console, a console which used optical discs instead of cartridges. And so, to the surprise and dismay of many a fanboy, Square released Final Fantasy VII on the Sony Playstation.

(As a side note about numbering: with VII, Square decided to junk the old renumbering strategy and just release the games with the same number on both sides of the Pacific. This was the right decision, despite the confusion ensuing from the leap from three to seven. Now that renumbered releases for all the games have come out, hopefully we can leave the old, wrong numbers in the past for good.)

Final Fantasy VII is notable because it is the first installment to have received mainstream marketing in America. I remember walking through a mall and seeing an Electronics Boutique with a big Final Fantasy VII display set up--I'm pretty sure I stopped and stared at it in confusion, wondering what specifically about this spiky-haired guy with a sword as big as he had to do with Final Fantasy or the general public. There were TV commercials, magazine ads...you name it. Final Fantasy: it's not just for the super nerds any more.

For old-school Final Fantasy fans, this was the Götterdämmerung that would change the face of the series forever.

I mentioned that Final Fantasy VI's industrial, vaguely steampunk setting stands in contrast to all the other Final Fantasy worlds. Final Fantasy VII's opening cutscene shows up-front and without a doubt that the setting is once again not your average Final Fantasy town. As the camera zooms out, we see cars driving by, neon lights, and a city which wouldn't be out-of-place in the mid-1900s. Much like the Abrams reboot of Star Trek, the game is saying "hey, I'm not your daddy's Final Fantasy."

That said, I applaud the direction that Square Enix took. If Final Fantasy weren't exploring new territory and expanding its horizons with every game, it wouldn't really be Final Fantasy. So without further ado (yes, all the previous paragraphs were just the 'ado' part), let's dive into: Final Fantasy VII.

The game, especially the first part, feels like a modern action movie, though in this case it would be an action movie where despite having guns most people stuck to hitting each-other with swords. There are hints of wheels-within-wheels machinations going on, but you're too busy playing Super Hero Man to worry about the actions of evil corporations.

Right away, the game is all about the action. The battle system is much more dynamic, taking advantage of the mysterious and powerful third dimension to showcase all sorts of special effects. This is distinct from Final Fantasy V, where the meat of the game was in the mechanics. In VII, you're running around, blowing stuff up, riding on motorcycles, hitting things with your comically oversized sword...it's all about the cool.

Then the game moves into the second part. Every RPG, or at least every RPG which isn't so much on rails that the developers have full control over the player's every move, gradually shifts from being a linear, scripted experience to being a more free-roaming exploratory experience. It takes a long time to get past this first part, but after it does it seems that the tone changes from a macho action-fest to more of an episode of Law and Order.

By the time the second and longest part rolls around, your heroes have realized that they can't solve every problem by punching it in the face. Instead, the game settles down and becomes more like a traditional RPG. You start to get weapons and items which allow you to take advantage of the game's skill-learning system, which is similar to that of Final Fantasy VI in how characters are quite customizable without being wholly interchangable. And, of course, the plot continues to drive you into finding the story behind these macro-political events.

Most RPGs would stop at this second part. Historically, how it's worked is that as you progress the amount of freedom you have increases and the amount of story which drives your actions decreases until you've practically forgotten why you're doing what you're doing. At least, that's how it works for me. I spend so much time doing side-quests and optional bits that I sometimes lose track of the main objective, sort of like this paragraph has gotten. Let's move on.

Near the end of the game, Final Fantasy VII pulls an M. Night Shyamalan by showing you that everything you've believed is a lie. Cloud is confronted with the fact that he was just pretending to be a macho soldier, but he was really just a wimp who looked up to his fellow soldiers Zack and Sephiroth...and that his companions knew this but were playing along anyway. It's kind of strange that this realization occurs so late in the game because by this point Cloud has personally maimed, eviscerated, and disemboweled about 85% of the world's monster population, has exposed an evil corporation whose genetic experiments have gotten out of control and whose rapacious appetite for resources is destroying the planet, and has destroyed a car with his sword while riding a motorcycle. I think he's gotten his hotshot cred firmly in place. But rather than taking solace in the fact that even if he's pretending to have been a hero in the past he certainly is a hero now, he goes into an angst-fest so intense it renders him practically comatose. Meanwhile, it turns out the joke character that's been with us the entire time is actually a puppet controlled by a spy high up in Shinra's ranks, and that Sephiroth, a solder Cloud looked up to, is really an angsty clone with mommy issues.

I'm not sure if Square thought it was necessary to go all crazy to top Final Fantasy VI's memorable dénouement or if they honestly thought that gamers would appreciate this eleventh-hour shift from sane to off-the-chains emo fest. Old-school Final Fantasy nerds criticize VII's climax as a train wreck from start to finish, but honestly I feel like Square could have pulled it off as a brilliant send-up of the macho-man action tropes if they hadn't overplayed their hand. As it is, though, the game becomes a painful experience--not because of the emotion but because it's just so profoundly stupid.

Although many gamers love Final Fantasy VII as a game, for me it is more notable for its legacy:
* Long introductory segments before the "real game" starts. It takes a long time before you've gotten out of Midgar, and most of that time is more of an interactive story than a game, showing off the 3-d graphics and FMV cutscenes. When a modern game feels slow for the first several hours (!), I blame Final Fantasy VII.
* Super-powerful battle moves. In all the previous games, battles were mostly just you and the enemy going back and forth. However, VII started the trend of both summons being the go-to attack and having boss battles be little more than a build-up to a super move.
* Long battle animations. Speaking of summons and super moves, Final Fantasy VII spends a bit too much time showing off its fancy (read: extremely dated today) graphics. In VI, I believe the longest attack animation is Ultima. That spell takes maybe five seconds? In Final Fantasy VII, casting Knights of the Round takes over two minutes.
* Emo-fests in place of actual emotion. Look at Terra from Final Fantasy VI. She wondered if she was ever capable of being normal, being accepted by human society, or feeling love. But it was all done so subtly that a single line of dialog packed a tremendous punch. I guess Square were concerned that not everybody "got" that punch and decided that they should signal to the players which emotions they're supposed to feel by making all the characters bipolar caricatures of real humans.
* Goofy character design. I don't know if I just have it in for Square-Enix character designers or what, but not only can I not stand Akira Toriyama's designs, Tetsuya Nomura's character designs look like the sort of thing I doodled in the margins of my homework in seventh grade. What is that thing on Cloud's shoulder, a model of the human heart? Why do the characters look like they could open a steel can using their hair?
* Remakes. Final Fantasy VII is also the reason Square started re-making seemingly their entire catalog. Once the game  achieved mainstream success, they said "hey, you liked Final Fantasy VII! Here's some other games in the same series that you ignored before!".

All these reasons really cause me to have a mixed opinion about Final Fantasy VII. Although the game itself is actually quite fun for the most part and I certainly spent a lot of time playing it, I hold the game in low esteem because of the painfully annoying ending bits plus the fact that subsequent games chose the least-praiseworthy elements to emulate.

In my review of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, I said:

In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that Western gamers didn't want an easier game; they wanted a different game, or specifically a different aesthetic. We will see in a few weeks how Square learned from this mistake, what it gained them, and what it cost them.

Square finally discovered the game that Western audiences were looking for, but I feel like in the process they lost the message that made games like the earlier Final Fantasies so brilliant.

[Vlad!]

In the late 80s and early 90s, a company called Quest was one of the many corporations trying to jump on the home video game bandwagon. They created a handful of games for the NES and Game Boy platforms. Then, in 1993, Yasumi  "Yaz" Matsuno created a game for the SNES called Legendary Ogre Battle, known in the US as Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (the homage to rock band Queen becoming a series staple). This game came essentially out of nowhere; there were certainly similar games (Gemfire  comes to mind from the SNES  era), but none of the same scope. Matsuno  would go on to direct another SNES game called Tactics Ogre (subtitled "Let Us Cling Together" in the US) which bore more resemblance to strategy series such as Nintendo's own Fire Emblem.

In 1995, the same year that Quest released Tactics Ogre, Matsuno and some of his design staff left the company and went to work for Squaresoft. Square then created a team of developers around Matsuno and set him to work on a project which, once released, was known as Final Fantasy Tactics.

Despite the name, Final Fantasy Tactics is still more Tactics Ogre than Final Fantasy. It weaves drama at the interpersonal level into geopolitical machinations and, eventually, supernatural influences in the highest levels of society. It also retains most of the familiar TO mechanics, including player-turn-based tactical battles, an emphasis on terrain advantage and balancing powerful mêlée with ranged attacks, and a progression from early difficult early battles requiring superior tactics to later battles where the player depends equally on tactics and force.

However, there are some changes. For instance, the game softens the Tactics Ogre idea of permanent character death with a timer, so if a character falls in battle you have a certain amount of time to revive him or her before the death becomes permanent. Also, as has become traditional in Final Fantasy games, Square added summon monsters, which are an incredibly powerful weapon in the player's arsenal and have a larger area of effect than anything in pretty much any other tactical game I've played.

Of these changes, though, there are two major differences between the Quest series and its Final Fantasy-ized spiritual successor which stand out. The first is the story progression. One of the hallmarks of the Ogre Saga series is that you the player have an "alignment" meter which determines how good or evil you are. Sometimes (as in the first one) it is kind of arbitrary and weird how your actions affect the meter, while in later installments the system feels much more refined. In either case, some story events and which characters you can get depend on this alignment--and perhaps more importantly, the ending you get depends on it as well. Final Fantasy Tactics did away with this system. This makes the game much more story-driven because the game offers only a single single plot path, but it also can make one feel like a victim of events rather than a driver. By the end of the game, Ramza and his party represent quite possibly the most powerful military force in Ivalice; seems like he could shape the course of events more than he does.

The second and I believe most significant change between the Quest games and FFT is the Final Fantasy job system. Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre have job systems, even allowing characters to progress in their jobs a la Fire Emblem or--in some cases--allowing characters to change jobs altogether. But not only does Final Fantasy offer a huge breadth of jobs which characters can switch between practically at will, it also adds learn-able skills for each job which stick with the character even when the class has changed. This, like Final Fantasy V did for the traditional RPG, allows you to customize your characters to a degree unprecedented in other tactical RPGs. Of course, again like Final Fantasy V, it is possible to produce characters so ridiculously overpowered that they break the game. By the time I reached the end, Ramza was dual-wielding two of the most powerful swords in the game, could counter the enemy's attack before it came, and was invulnerable to status effects and most ranged attacks. The last boss killed most of my party about halfway through the battle and I won with Ramza alone.

Which ironically brings me to my main complaint about the game: in places it becomes almost punishingly hard. I don't mind a challenge, but I can recall at least two places where I was really concerned that I wouldn't even be able to advance because the enemy I faced was too overpowering. If you want to learn the most powerful skills you're going to have to spend a lot of time on the battlefield; this is bread and butter for most traditional RPGs, but for tactical RPGs this almost amounts to tedium, since in each battle there's a lot of moving characters around and other fluff before you get to the action.

Another gripe is the translation. Ted Woolsey had left the company by the time these games were primed for their journey across the pond, and both FFVII and the FFT certainly suffered for it. There is one particularly amusing (or annoying, depending on your point of view) translation bug which stands out to me: the battle objective was "kill X's elder brother", when the game was trying to say "kill X". I suspect the error was due to the way the Japanese use familial relationships as honorifics, so the most literal translation would have been "kill X, the elder brother". (X's brother was also involved in the battle, and due to the translation confusion I killed him. Well, he was on my side, and killing him caused me to lose the battle. Whoops!)

On the other hand, there are also many good points to the game. For one, even though the Quest guys composed the music instead of series composer Nobuo Uematsu, it's quite well-done. The core mechanics are solid, and (most importantly) the game is a lot of fun. Even though the game could have used more balance in places, Square took the tactics RPG--once relegated to the type of nerds that even regular nerds made fun of--and placed it firmly in the mainstream.

If you have a PSP, pick up the FFT re-release for that platform (I think it's called War of the Lions). I don't have a PSP, but I don't really need yet another console. The game also has inspired two sequels for the GBA and DS, respectively, but I could never really get into them. They really seem like "tactics for newbies" games, which is not the direction I was hoping the series would go.

Though I really like Final Fantasy Tactics, I do have to lament the loss of the Ogre Saga games. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber the reason I bought my N64, and Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis for the GBA was lots of fun. Square bought up Quest in 2002, sealing the death of the Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre series.

Next week: angst, sorceresses, and guns that you have to hit people with.

[bloop]

FFT pissed me off BIG TIME the first time I tried it.  I got to a battle, and it was unwinnable for my characters at the level they were, and there was no way to back out, so I took a year off the game.  When I went back to it, I utilized the frog trick and that was never a problem again.  It's among my favorites of all time now.

[Vlad!]

There were two battles in particular that I had to redo so many times that I was seriously concerned I had gotten myself into an unwinnable situation. I know that for at least one of them I ended up abusing save states big time XD.

I've sort of stalled writing these at FFIX because honestly I'm not sure I remember enough about it and its mechanics to give it a solid review. I think it's coming to PSN later this month, actually. I'd rather avoid playing it on an emulator if possible. If you pholks have a Final Fantasy-related topic to suggest then I'll be glad to tackle that one and hopefully hit up FFIX either Memorial Day weekend or the weekend after that.

(If not then I'll just watch some gameplay videos on YouTube to refresh my memory).

[Vlad!]

We discussed two weeks ago how Final Fantasy VII took the series in a completely new direction--if not a clean break with the past, at least an appreciable bend and twist. Millions of gamers experienced their first Final Fantasy with VII, and the game completely took off in the North American market. In fact, VII remains the best-selling Final Fantasy to date. This is the stage upon which Final Fantasy VIII made its entrance.

You may, perhaps, remember the commercial for Final Fantasy VIII. Recall that while VII's pre-rendered FMV cutscenes were revolutionary, these days we get better graphics from the game engine itself, rendering in real-time. But what we saw in that commercial was a glimpse of the future: the cutting edge of computer generated graphics. It also showed an epic swordfight, a passionate embrace, and a woman shooting a turret gun. Excitement rode high. Interestingly, as with VII, Square partnered with Eidos to release VIII on the PC, which is where I played it (and then completing the cycle, earlier this year Square actually bought Eidos).

Battles in VIII are very similar to those in VII. Summoning still holds the same exalted position, and boss battles feel even more like you're just biding your time until you hit Overdrive, which is the FFVIII version of Limit Break. One bit of innovation is that different characters have various timed hit triggers, so if you press a button at the right time during the attack you end up doing more damage. Summons also gain the ability to charge by tapping a button to do more damage, which basically just gives the player something mindless to do while the lengthy animation is playing.

The plot setup also feels like it involved a lot of copy/paste from VII. You're a member of a quasi-military organization with only vaguely defined goals and you wreak random havoc in a setting that feels like how our modern day would be if we still mostly hit things with swords. Oh, except that our swords are also guns...but they're guns that you have to hit people with. Yeah, I don't understand it either.

Speaking of things I don't understand, another thing swiped from VII is the complete disaster VIII calls its plot.

Some might point the blame finger at Kazuhige Nojima, the writer who joined Square in 1996 and was responsible for work on VII and VIII, along with such uninspiring works as Final Fantasy X-2 and Kingdom Hearts. Others might just say that Square were going with what worked. Whichever it is, Final Fantasy VIII blasts the player with so much crazy that it makes the ending bits of Final Fantasy VII look positively normal by comparison.

Honestly, this plot is just a mess. Mass amnesia, switching back and forth between timelines, evil organizations with inexplicable motives, and of course the requisite angst-fest, cranked to eleven for your convenience. When I was playing this game, I really wanted to like it. I don't know if it was denial or Stockholm syndrome, but I kept telling myself that I was just not understanding its depth. But even though I was in high school and thus within Square's target audience, the story just felt lame and contrived. Bottom line, Final Fantasy VIII has uninteresting and outright annoying characters and a plot which can only be described as downright stupid.

Before I go off on a rant, though, I want to touch on the original and weird things this game brought to the table.

First of all, for some reason the limits are all round numbers. Instead of being limited to 99 of the same item, you can carry 100. Your stats all max out at 100 instead of 99, including your level (as I learned to my dismay when a mustache kitty obliterated my level 100 party by casting Level 5 Death). I don't know if there's any real significance to this, and it didn't carry over to the other games, but it's interesting.

Also, the card battle. FFVIII has a mini-game of sorts called Triple Triad, which is a collectable card game. Final Fantasy VII really championed the idea of the minigame, and I guess VIII brought it to the next level. I actually liked Triple Triad a lot more than I liked Final Fantasy VIII. I played through all the Triple Triad-based subplots but couldn't complete my card collection because the freaking Random rule ended up taking over and I couldn't get all the character cards from Cid's wife. If none of that makes any sense to you, you're probably lucky.

FFVIII also has a much different weapon system; instead of buying new weapons you gather materials and upgrade your existing weapons. This was an interesting experiment, but the frustrating thing about it is that you have to get the recipe, then figure out how to get all the ingredients (sometimes involving rare random drops from battles), and only *then* can you upgrade your weapon. I cheated out the wazoo by reading a FAQ (yeah, lame, but I was a kid) and it was still annoying.

The game also does away with the traditional magic system, instead offering the "draw" system. Each spell has its own number of casts (0-100, of course), and you increase the casts by "drawing" magic from certain spots around the world. You could also junction spells to your weapons and armor, which is how you'll be using pretty much every spell except Aura and Meltdown. Magic as an attack is thus pretty much worthless.

There is no real job system to speak of, but you can customise your characters by giving them "abilities". For example, one might have the "Revive" ability which revives dead party members without using magic or items. At higher levels this is ridiculously broken; it makes up for magic being useless by instead giving your characters unlimited-use abilities to do the same thing. Um, OK.

Finally, and I hope I'm not remembering this wrong, I think the world map is actually not broken in FFVIII. You see, in most Final Fantasies, the world map is a rectangle. When you fly off the far eastern edge you move to the same latitude on the western edge, which is fine. But when you fly off the northern edge, you appear at the same longitude on the southern edge, which is of course not the way that round worlds work (Ted Woolsey made a pun on this and the company's name in Final Fantasy VI by using the phrase THE WORLD IS SQUARE as the password in Daryl's Tomb).

Though there are a lot of interesting tidbits which make Final Fantasy VIII not entirely devoid of noteworthiness, ultimately it is still a very poor game, and in my opinion is the weakest of the Final Fantasies. The characters which aren't forgettable are annoying, the plot is shameful in the times when it's even intelligible, the entire game feels highly derivative, and it says something when the player has more fun playing virtual cards than the game itself.

There are some good points to the game as well, but they get completely lost in all the dross and unfortunately are far from enough to redeem Final Fantasy VIII from being little more than a tremendous letdown.

[Vlad!]

As we discussed last time, Square essentially lost their way with Final Fantasy VIII. And though they had achieved the seemingly impossible by bringing RPGs to the mainstream, in the process the lost a lot of what brought them to the place where they had the power to make that dream  possible. Even the Godfather himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi, seemed uneasy with the direction the series was going. So while the Japanese studio began development of Final Fantasy X for the Playstation 2, Square's infamous Hawaii studio worked on the game which would eventually become Final Fantasy IX--and a return to the series' roots.

Final Fantasy IX is really the anti-FFVIII. It is deliberately reminiscent of the older SNES-era games, and it feels very much like the sort of game the developers of, say, FFIV wished they could have made, if only they had the hardware for it. Its setting is medieval rather than modern, its story is as ancient as they come, its characters are familiar to anyone who loves the fantasy genre, its style is old-school rather than new-school, and even its music is inspired by the old classics. Truly, could this be a return to form for Squaresoft?

Final Fantasy IX brings back, among other things, the static job system à la Final Fantasy IV. Characters have set classes, and will only progress in a very set way. Characters learn their abilities from equipment, which is interesting and fits in with the style while still remaining somewhat original. Magic is back in its important role after being mostly cast aside in FFVIII. And while there are summon monsters and Trance (think Limit Break), the game doesn't really give you the embarrassingly overpowered super moves any more. Battles feel very much like they did on the SNES.

In fact, the first disc is really all the Final Fantasy fan could want, providing a delightful picaresque with the mischievous rogue Zidane and the sheltered princess Garnet. The black mage, Vivi, is a quintessential Woobie character who oozes loveability and to this day remains a beloved icon of the game and the series. Each character embarks on a deeply personal journey full of self-discovery. After finishing the first disc, the game had sold me.

But there are four discs.

Though the developers crafted an impressively epic world, an interesting story, and a setting worthy of exploration, somewhere around disc three Final Fantasy IX really begins to lose its message. Whether it's running around doing fetch quests, defeating a nefarious mini-boss intent on doing something horrible to the innocent population of some city, or just crossing the "i"s and dotting the "t"s of the pre-climax action of any RPG, somewhere along the way the game begins to feel unfocused. Perhaps the developers were trying hard to explore every angle of their world or perhaps the game is just plain too long, but whatever the reason it begins to feel interminable.

Then comes disc four. While certainly no FFVIII or even VII, Square's Shyamalan-esque attempts at drama leave the player wondering which orifice they extracted certain plot twists from. When coupled with the fact that the game had already lost many players' attention, the climax and ending seemed more contrived than cathartic.

Final Fantasy IX is a good game. Sakaguchi seems to agree, calling it his favorite Final Fantasy--certainly high praise. Though it suffers from several problems, it has some intensely interesting characters, refreshingly retro gameplay, and a lighthearted feel that the series was sorely needing. Though its disjointed and unfocused nature makes it far more forgettable than other installments, it is a worthy heir of the Final Fantasy legacy.

Unfortunately, the game is also an evolutionary dead-end. As mentioned above, Square were creating Final Fantasy X in Japan with their main team at the same time as they were working on IX in Hawaii with a second team. So while IX takes the series in a worthwhile direction, X was at the same time moving in a completely different direction. Final Fantasy IX is ultimately the last farewell to the past.

[Vlad!]

Transitioning from 16 to 32 bits brought about the single biggest shift in the history of the franchise, even larger than the changes during the move from 8 to 16. So when Final Fantasy X released for the Playstation 2 just a year after FFIX, which as I discussed last time represented a return to the series' roots, the biggest question was whether it would dramatically reimagine of the franchise, or possibly continue the trend of going back to the way things were before.

I don't want to ruin the suspense, but the answer to both of those questions is "no".

The two most immediately noticeable changes in Final Fantasy X are the use of fully-rendered 3-d backgrounds and the voice acting during cutscenes. Those who have read some of my other video game rantings know that I'm not a big fan of either, but Square obviously felt that these elements were necessary for a modern game. One amusing quirk is that the game still lets you rename the protagonist, which means that the dialog has to go to nearly ridiculous lengths to avoid including his name during voiced segments. The ability to rename the hero has always seemed kind of silly to me anyway, and so far X is the last game which allows it.

The most immediately noticeable lack of change is that the game's hero, Tidus, looks like he dressed himself from a dumpster and is a whiny 18-to-22-year-old with the emotional maturity of someone half that age.

To be fair, the game does have a few likeable characters. Unfortunately they mostly get lost in the plot, which in keeping with Square's new philosophy of "if they can't understand it they must think it's deep" managed through a combination of effrontery and legerdemain to keep me confused and annoyed for pretty much the entire latter half of the game. There are actually several interesting plot points--including a scapegoat-turned-on-its-head theme that would make Dostoyevsky grin--but the story is so ham-handed and spotty that it feels as though the scenario designers really just wanted to either write a book or produce a movie, not create a game.

In fact, the inconsistent tone ends up being a continual annoyance. You are a party of brave adventurers fighting against powers too massive to truly comprehend, bucking the tradition which kept the land safe for centuries and questioning the very nature of their existence. However, the male lead is an immature teenager who takes his fashion cues from Lady Gaga, your party members include a ditzy blonde danceaholic and a gothy mage dressed like a streetwalker, your character's profession involves playing soccer underwater, and your character's best friend is a walking Caribbean islander stereotype who makes Hermes Conrad look like a lesson in cultural sensitivity.

I'm going to stop before I get too ranty, so moving on to the game part of the game. The biggest change to the core game mechanics is levelling up. Rather than having levels per se, gaining skills, abilities, and stat bonuses is all accomplished by adding spheres to the "sphere grid". This grid is simply a map of connected spheres, and each character starts out with a few spheres already filled in on the grid. Ability points gained in battle grant the ability to use spheres also acquired in battle to fill in more and more spheres. If this system sounds confusing, it's because it kind of is. The punch line is basically that each character has skills that are easy to learn (closer to that character's starting point on the grid), but eventually each character could in theory learn all available skills and abilities and acquire all available stat bonuses. It's an interesting experiment, but though it allows the gamer to make some choices about character customization it really winds up being more of an annoyance than anything else.

I was also interested to see that Square went with a turn-based battle system for FFX. It is certainly a very nice turn-based system and I have nothing against that, but at the same time it's not what I would have expected. The game still retains other modern series setpieces, though, such as the use of summon monsters to turn the tides of battle.

In short, the biggest criticism against Final Fantasy X is that its reach exceeds its grasp. There are interesting characters who don't get to shine because Tidus has to steal each scene with his whiny soliloquies. There are worthwhile plot nuggets buried in a string of incomprehensible events. There's a big and bustling world, but exploration and discovery gives way to linearity more than ever before in the series. It beautifully showcases the PS2's graphical and sound capabilities, but gives us characters who look silly and have horrible voice acting. The game can't even keep its own story straight.

Final Fantasy X was also Sakaguchi's, er, final Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy IX was really his swan song because it was the last one he was deeply involved in; though he served the title of Executive Producer for FFX, his departure from the company and eventual founding of his own development shop was already in the cards.

FFX is a worthwhile game, but I don't feel like it lives up to its potential. The series at this point seems to emphasize story, but the Final Fantasy-style JRPG is not the ideal medium for storytelling. It doesn't matter how brilliant a story the writers start out with; by trying as they have to force it into the Final Fantasy mold, they end up forcing gamers into a linear path, interfering with the gameplay, and making each point about as subtle as the innuendo in an AC/DC song.

Next week we're going to take a journey down a surprising path: a direct sequel.

[bloop]

I thought X was a lot less irritatingly ponderous in its storytelling than VIII or VII, and very likely my favorite of them since it moved to 3D (It's between IX and X for me).  I haven't played XIII yet.

[Vlad!]

I thought X was a lot less irritatingly ponderous in its storytelling than VIII or VII, and very likely my favorite of them since it moved to 3D (It's between IX and X for me).  I haven't played XIII yet.

That's certainly true during the beginning, though I think as it nears the end the pacing gets a little wonky as they try to instill a sense of urgency while cramming in way too much material. And honestly even though what you say makes sense, I don't think it overcomes all the game's other glaring flaws.

My favorite of the Sony era? That's a tough one, if only because I think FF IV, V, and VI are all better than anything that came after (I assume I can't count FFIV DS as falling under "since it moved to 3D"?). If I can count Tactics then I'm definitely going to go with that one, but if we're talking main-line FF here then I'd say either VII or IX. VII got stupid near the end and I stand by all the criticisms I leveled against it, but I love exploring the world and VII had a huge world to explore. IX was fun, but it was also kind of forgettable. I want to play it on the PSN, though that would require me to upgrade my firmware and I'm not sure if playing IX again is worth losing the ability to boot into Linux. Hopefully geohot (or someone) gets a hack out soon.

[bloop]

I'm not going to argue with you on that.  I can't, actually - I don't know how you are writing all you are writing on recollection with these games.  I don't remember all their systems so vividly.

VII is good, but monstrously overrated to me.  I had a friend tell me he couldn't go back to inferior RPG's, like FFVI(!), after playing something so polished.  Thus, I much preferred the more understated IX to it.

[Vlad!]

I'm not going to argue with you on that.  I can't, actually - I don't know how you are writing all you are writing on recollection with these games.  I don't remember all their systems so vividly.

It's my curse...I can name all the characters in all the Final Fantasy games from memory, but I can't recall the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

VII is good, but monstrously overrated to me.  I had a friend tell me he couldn't go back to inferior RPG's, like FFVI(!), after playing something so polished.  Thus, I much preferred the more understated IX to it.

My roommate (yes, the one who named a girl after himself) felt the same way. I can understand why, but it still seems tragic to dislike a game because of others' misguided opinions. It's unquestionably overrated (though "polished"? Really?), but I still think it's better than X.

Of course, to be honest most of my dislike for X comes from my hatred of Tidus. I think Final Fantasy X sans Tidus and Wakka would be a much stronger game.

(Though it's still pretty ridiculous how the battles are basically "bide your time until you can summon". I remember I had a lot of trouble beating Seymour on Mt. Gagazet until my roommate was like "why are you trying to do it the hard way? Just focus all your energy on getting Yuna to summon Bahamut". Sad.)