Topic: Final fantasy discussion thread

@Voltan Will definitely be playing FF8 next but I think I'll be taking a break from the series for now so that I won't get burned out. I also think I'm going to need all the motivation I can get in order to fully enjoy the junction system.

@LtSarge Makes sense, take your time. The system is pretty unique but unfortunately that’s not always a good thing
9’s job system might not have been as original but it made much more sense to me

@LtSarge glad you enjoyed it - just imagine the impression it would have left on you if you played it at launch off the back of games like Sonic 😂

It’s good to hear it can still have such an impression without the nostalgia, though. It always comes up in best game ever conversations and even I sometimes wonder if it’s really that good.

Then I remember - of course it is 🤪

As for 8, I am sure you’ll enjoy it. It has a much different tone to 7, which is why I think it’s a fairly divisive instalment. I think you’ll get a lot out of 8,9 and 10 though.

@LtSarge Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Did you go through all the shenanigans with the chocobos to get Knights of the Round? And did you dare take on Emerald or Ruby Weapon? It wasn't until years after first playing the game that I finally beat Ruby and that was with a lot of grinding to have W-summon linked to KOTR and then a couple of mimic materia too. It didn't make for much of a fun experience just watching that summon over and over though

Like I said before though, the story really is incredibly in depth and there are still things I'm finding out about Jenova and the whole Zack storyline even now.

I look forward to your thoughts on the Remake and on FF8 too when you get to them though.

Personally, I can't see how they can really make FF7R2 too open world. I guess the game does a decent job at restricting you in places as you need certain modes of transport to access various areas but I think it will be much more linear than the original game. I'm still excited to see what they do decide to do!

Final Fantasy VIII is a bit of a mess but I love it. The battle system is totally broken, but I'm okay with it because I play the games for the stories and exploring the worlds etc. and I think FFVIII has a good story, with a good cast, and it's unusual enough within the Final Fantasy series that it feels fresh.

@Th3solution That's actually a very good point: wait enough for the game to feel fresh again but don't wait too long in order to appreciate the differences. I definitely want to tackle FF7R with that mindset, so I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

Yeah the thing is that making an open world game takes so much longer and I see that all the time in articles over at Pure Xbox. For example, Halo Infinite has taken so long because the developer wanted to make an open world title. Same with Hellblade II, we haven't heard about that game for so long and that's because the developer is supposedly making an open world game as well. Going this direction with your video game will drastically prolong development time, so that's why I think we won't see Remake 2 until 2025.

@kyleforrester87 Haha yeah, playing it back in the day would've been so awesome. I'm just glad that I've come around to appreciating PS1 games more now in general as before I barely liked anything from its library. Didn't like the Resi trilogy because of tank controls, played through them this year and absolutely loved them. Same with FF7 now, I genuinely really like PS1 games now.

I feel like people who think that FF7 is overrated or whatever just have forgotten how good it is because it absolutely holds up well today. Just goes to show what an impact it had back then.

Yeah I'm very excited to play through 8, 9 and 10 next. It feels great to finally be going through what I guess is considered the golden age of Final Fantasy.

@Thrillho I think I barely touched upon the side content in this game besides getting Yuffie and Vincent that is. Although I did accidentally run into Emerald Weapon while I was looking for things underwater and it whooped my butt. Suffice to say, I don't think I would've been able to defeat them without some good build.

I'm actually halfway though Advent Children now and I have to say, Cloud's relation to Zack is very interesting because we don't know much about what happened between those two. That's one of the reasons why I really want to play through Crisis Core so that I can find out more about Zack.

Well I thought considering you get access to the world map after Midgar that the game is now technically considered open world, even though like I've said in the past it's just an illusion and you're still going in a linear path. But if they were to replicate the original game, then I don't think they'd just make a world map with chibi-looking Cloud running around with simply updated graphics. They'll have to make an actual open world. But yeah, we'll just have to see how they pull it off.

Also I just have to ask because I've completely forgotten about it until now: what did the Huge Materia serve for purpose in the story of FF7? You give them to the old man in the Cosmo Canyon and he keeps them safe but we don't actually use them for anything in the story. I guess they were just supposed to resemble the four crystals of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water that shows up in every FF game.

I think the world map on FF7 will be like they handled it on 10. That is, no world map at all and just paths linking areas. Maybe they’ll be a little wider, but I am not expecting FF15 levels of open space.

Best Final Fantasy villain

@LtSarge RE: Zack and Cloud, there is a hugely important scene in the game you may have missed that tells a lot of their story that you only get going back to the basement of the Shinra mansion late on in the game.

There’s absolutely no reason to go back there and it’s some serious story that is so easy to miss otherwise.

So I just finished watching FF7 Advent Children Complete and this was such an awesome and wholesome movie, I absolutely loved it! The story was interesting with the whole remnants of Sephiroth looking for Jenova and wanting to resurrect Sephiroth. But the best part was being able to see more of all the characters you've come to love from the original game and actually hear them speak. Before seeing the movie, I didn't care that much about the Turks but in Advent Children, Reno and Rude got so much screen time that I actually adore these guys now.

(On a side note, Reno kinda reminds me of Axel from Kingdom Hearts in looks, voice and personality, so that's maybe why I like him so much, lol. All he needs to do is start saying "Got it memorised?" and we got the perfect Axel clone)

But yeah, it was so cool seeing the old team back together again and even Aerith showed up a lot of times! Just like with the Turks, it was nice seeing more interactions between them, especially with Yuffie and Vincent since they were only optional characters in the original. Vincent is seriously much cooler than I thought, which makes me glad that I used him throughout most of FF7. Furthermore, their fight against Bahamut (I think it was?) was genuinely awesome and seeing the old villains like Rufus and the Turks working together with Cloud and the team was really cool. Moreover, I really liked that Zack got a fair amount of screen time as well, it was nice seeing just how close he was to Cloud. And finally, the last fight against Sephiroth was insane. Cloud got absolutely shredded by him but somehow managed to survive all of that, lol. Also, the Jenova and One Winged Angel remixes were really good!

In all honesty, I think this movie was just perfection in terms of satisfying an FF7 fan like me. It had everything: tons of character interactions, awesome battles, great music and so on. I'm so glad that I watched it right after finishing the original FF7, I just love the game so much more now.

After I was done watching the movie, I thought: "man, I really wish they could remake FF7" but then I remembered that they did, lol. FF7 genuinely has the most memorable and likeable Final Fantasy universe that I've seen so far, I just want to experience more of it!

@Thrillho Oh wow, that scene was also in Advent Children! I guess they realised that most people probably missed out on it and decided to recreate it in the movie, which is nice. I'm definitely glad to have learned more about Zack's backstory.

I’m attempting FF8 for the millionth time. Wish me luck. I forgot just how downright f***ing silly the opening cutscene was.

@nessisonett Do you always give up because you get bored?

@johncalmc I’ve gotten to the missile silo 3 times and quit there, quit another couple of times on the second Laguna section. Bored is about right, the level scaling means you’re on essentially a flat rollercoaster and it’s not as if the story’s fantastic.

@nessisonett I always liked FFVIII but it's one those things where I like it despite knowing how many problems it has. It's like a Pirates of the Caribbean movie or something for me.

I dislike the level scaling quite a lot because even though it's not true level scaling and you'll still find weak(er) enemies, it still doesn't feel right. Also drawing magic is boring. And the battle system is totally broke.

I actually do think the story gets quite strong though. For a while it seems like it's about something and then later it seems it's really about something else and it goes in some pretty interesting directions for a Final Fantasy. I would certainly recommend persevering with it if only so you don't have to start it again in a year's time and play the first fifteen hours for the fourth time.

@nessisonett I quite like FF8 but my problem is I had a copy where disc two didn't work. I must have completed the first disc three or four times until I got a working second disc so I can't face going through all of that faff again.

@Thrillho The PS4 cheats are going to be your friend here. You can get through the first disc in probably five or six hours*

*no guarantees, I just guessed.

After yesterday’s State of Play announcement of FFXVI coming summer 2023, I was thinking that we sure are getting a lot of Final Fantasy lately. FF7R was 2 years ago and it’s DLC was 1 year ago. FFXIV has had pretty massive ongoing support over the last couple years. FF Strangers in Paradise just came out. And now FFXVI. Potentially FF7R2 news might be soon as well.

From 2013-2020 Final Fantasy seemed to be dying as a franchise, but it seems like there might be a resurrection of the IP going on. Depending on how FF7R2 is handled, there may end up being annualized releases within the series for a while. Or maybe even two mainline releases within the same year?! Not likely, but I would suspect FF7R2 would be no later than 2024.

I was worried this may lead to over saturation, but then if you think about it, the stretch of FF7, FF8, FF9, FF10 was pretty much annual releases. And that was what most would consider to be the golden age of Final Fantasy.

Props to Square Enix for keeping the ol’ grey mare going for all these years.

Thoughts on yesterday then?

It’s cool that they’ve done a Crisis Core remake as I never played that and it obviously links in very heavily with the main game, particularly as Zack looks like he’s going to play a bigger role..

Who knows what they’re doing with the main game though. I guess it’s good to know it will just be a trilogy but the weighting of the games feels weird if leaving Midgar is 1/3 of the series. But it looks like the story is going to divert a fair bit.

I’m a bit mixed on that. A blow by blow remake would have been a little bit dull but going too crazy will just be jarring, particularly with them hinting at not bothering with one of the most iconic gaming moments from that era!

@Thrillho It feels a bit weird to have Midgar be a third of the story given you can be out of Midgar in a few hours in the original, but then I also think you could drop the amount of time spent in other places and lose nothing. Kalm, for example, and the Chocobo Ranch could be a cutscene. Same with some other places.

It also seems like it won't matter at all because it's not going to be a remake. I hope we're reading too much into it and it actually is still like 80% faithful like the first part but I'm not holding my breath. I'm quite down on it because I wanted a remake for so long and then they announced it, and then what we got wasn't that. And I'm irritated by that.

Whatevs. We know now, so at least I won't feel tricked by this one. And I did enjoy most of remake and I like the characters and the combat is fun so I'm still looking forward to Rebirth even if it isn't what I want them to do.

Also, while we're on the remake, I'm sick of the narrative that you see from the Final Fantasy Defence Force on Twitter etc. that if people want a straight remake we should just go play the original etc. or that a remake would be pointless. If they hadn't done a mostly faithful remake of Resident Evil 2 we'd have missed out on one of the best survival horror games of the last generation. If they'd turned Shadow of the Colossus into a rhythm game for banter we'd have lost the definitive version of that game. Demon's Souls, etc. and more too.

Remakes don't have to be exactly 1:1 but can be pretty faithful and still be interesting, even fantastic games.

But then I'm not sure any of it matters. Even if it was absolutely magical, even if it was everything I wanted to be, it still wouldn't have erased my nostalgia for the original and I'd probably still prefer that. So maybe they're right about the whole thing.

@johncalmc Yeah, there would hopefully be less padding than they had to fill the first part with and plenty of stuff they could cut.

I guess we’ve already had most of the exposition that the original game had in long cut scenes just after leaving Midgar too.

But generally I’m with you that a reasonably close remake would have been amazing but I’m tentatively excited to see quite what they do.