What I liked about Triple Triad was that it required a lot of skill and very little luck. Especially when you have OPEN and PLUS. You have to look at all your moves, figure out how your opponent will react and how you’ll react.
I never even attempted Chocobo Racing in FFX except to beat the lady. Beating zero … nuh-uh. Although I found every other mini game fairly easy (including the butterfly one) except for the ultimate twitchy games in FFX-2, those towers. I assume no one on earth has ever beat every tower.
FFVIII was the first game in the series that made me realize that it wasn’t made for my culture. I wish they did that more. Except for X-2 which was so J-pop which I hate.
FF VI is so good, even Hironobu Sakaguchi has said they were in the zone with that game Suicide, Shadow’s dreams, father-daughter relationships…that game was awesome.
FF VIII was really the only one to even try since then…
I never knew till I read through a walkthrough at Game FAQS to see what I was missing. I always lost him at that one point. There are several of little sidequests in that game that are easily missable. And not all of them happy.
That’s one of the things I wish they made more of. It makes the world seem grander. Otherwise it feels like you’re just being forced down a path.
I’m on chapter 5 of X-2 and still like it. It’s weird that I like it so much, because it’s not like I’m some huge anime geek… there are a lot of animes I like but I like them because they’re good and not just because they’re animes. Maybe it’s because I liked the characters in X so much, especially Yuna. I even liked Yuna’s thunder plains concert, but I probably wouldn’t have in another context.
A recent Final Fantasy game I really didn’t like was Crystal Chronicles. It probably would have been fun in co-op, but I played it alone and it was boring.
I haven’t played any that were older than VII, but I loved the original Super Mario RPG, which was made by Square. It had something that’s missing from all of the later Mario RPGs.
I used to play FF games quite often, although these days, I usually don’t bother with RPGs. FF7 was my favorite, followed by FF6. FF8 was okay, and I liked a lot of the characters (Quistis was my favorite), but I never got into it the way I did 7. Nine sucked. And I bought that one new shortly after its release. Never in all my gaming days had I felt so gypped. I did like X, though. Played through twice, and completed all the character’s ultimate weapons the second time through. Nearly broke my controller and my sanity in the process, but I really wanted those crests and sigils.
X-2 seemed a little too…I dunno, cutesy-girly for me, so I never got into it. Besides, I only wanted to see how the storyline continued, so a plot synopsis is fine for me. After that, I’ve gotten FF Tactics Advance, and some of the FF remakes on Game Boy, but never bought another new FF. No more of my money shall Square get.
But y’know, I haven’t played FF8 in a long time, and I didn’t care for it much then. Maybe I should give it another try.
I’ve heard of this game being referred to as “Pretty Princess Dress Me Up”, and I’ve never been tempted to buy it. While I enjoyed some aspects of FFX, I couldn’t stand many of the characters, so I decided not to buy FFX-2.
FF9 was just…aggravating. The card game was a pain (and unimaginative), the game was too twitchy, and there were way too many movies. I did enjoy the chocobo hunt minigame, sort of, but it was too clearly a rework of FF8’s chocobo minigame.
9 was certainly simpler, but I felt it was a better example of Final Fantasy than 7 or 8. It’s only real fault was to be somewhat shallow. Still, in terms of battle complexity, I find it much more engaging than 7 or 8 (or even 10). There’s a lot of neat tricks you can find in the fights, and that makes it pretty fun if you’re open to the possibility. Plus, stealing from bosses becomes an art-form.
Yeah, X-2 definitely has that aspect. It’s got kind of a grrl power! thing going on. I’m almost starting to get embarassed at how much I like it because I’m a 19 year old guy, and my interest in the characters really does go beyond ogling them in different outfits, so I’m not part of the target audience. Maybe it’s the Melodramatic Romanticism with the connection between two lovers 1000 years ago.
Changing their outfits is really just to change classes, and you mostly don’t have to do that if you don’t want. I don’t really see it as a dress-up game any more than other games where characters look different when you change their class.
FF Tactics Advance is fun, but I thought it got a little old after awhile.
first of all, i want to make sure we’re going by the numbers on the box/cd/cartridge…not necessarily the japanese equivalencies…or what not…arg…i’m so confused.
it seems that this is the case with video games as a whole these days…graphics are leaned on more and more these days…for games that NEEDED to have replayability and substance, the older ones are better.
yes, i know the designer/japanese guy said they were in the zone with 7 (it was 7, right? arg…)
final fantasy 2 and 3, so far, were the best ones. the newer ones were nice eye candy, but they had inferior qualities about them. echoing what you guys are saying (mostly) about the side games…is that i think they try and incorporate edgy things in there…and it really just disturbs the flow of the game.
it seems that the nifiter and more fun the graphics are, the less time it takes to beat the game, and usually the less replayability it has.
Assuming you mean 4 and 6 (which have been rereleased with the proper numbers - escpecially important as 2 has been released (twice) in English, and there’s rumours of a remake of 3 down the pike), 4 is a collection of clicheed plots and characters - even worse than the original, which despite having characters who were entirely interchangable cyphers, at least had the time warp bit at the end, and the class upgrades to keep it from being a bog-standard D&D rip-off. 6 had an interesting story, but it railroads you until the world’s destroyed then pretty much craps out. Unless you ignore the sidequests, in which case the WoR is about 2 hours long - but at least the plot continues apace. Anything that differentiated the characters in battle went out the window once you get espers - Fight and most special abilities become completely useless about then, so everyone’s dropped into a Summon-Spell pattern - and it doesn’t take long for all active characters to end up with all the useful spells.
The real 2, apparently, has a pretty good story, but has the most frustrating non-twitch gameplay I’ve ever seen, and has the most absurdly unbalanced battle system ever. (It’s the only game I’ve ever seen where you could level up by finding a couple goblins and ignoring them while smacking the living hell out of your own party.)
Having played the real 3 with the help of a fan translation, seems to have cyphers caught up in the most inovative plot of the series, and one of the more fun gameplay systems.
The Playstation games still have flaws, to be sure, but there’s still real plot once the railroading stops, they have both an interresting plot and interresting characters, and VII is the only one that encourages complete genericism.
This is from someone who was (re)playing III, VI, VII, and X all at the same time recently.
I like 5. It’s not one of my favourites, but of the ones I’ve played (or at least tried to) I’d put it above 1, 2, and 4. And most of the non-mainline games - Mystic Quest, Tactics, and so on. Catch me in the right mood, and I’d even put it above 6, 7, 8 and 10.
About 10 years ago I played FF7 & FF8. Once I learned how to link materia (?) in 7 I loved it. In FF8 I couldn’t kill anything without summoning, which resulted in me watching the same video clips over and over. Perhaps I didn’t do something right, like equip my weapons, or something. Can you win most regular fights without summoning? (I apologize if this doesn’t make much sense. It was about 10 years ago.)
I recently finished playing FFX. I had maxed out everybody’s stats except for Luck. (HP and MP were maxed in the sense that I don’t use Break Limits for them). I have 3 ultimate weapons, but I refuse to play Blitzball (does anybody like it? I only tried once other than the time you have to), and there’s no way I’m going to try to dodge 200 lightening bolts, score less than 0 seconds in a chocobo race, catch butterflies, or whatever else I’m forgetting. I found myself just killing Earth Eater over and over for Fortune spheres until I said to myself “Why am I still playing this game?”
Plot ends at the World of Ruin in FF6? Hah - that was one of my favorite parts of the game, because right after, Setzer has his time in the spotlight remembering Daryl. sniff And they say Squall and Rinoa have a love story. Feh.
For me, 5 had a certain atmosphere and uniqueness not found in the other games. Where the crystals actually had something to do with the plot, where the “wild world”(world 2) felt wild. And the whole technology level appealed to me.
