Final Fantasy VI

Here we are, after so long. I started this blog only a few months ago and we're officially seven games into the series. Six final bosses have fallen: Chaos, The Emperor, The Cloud of Darkness, Julius, Zeromus, and Exdeath have all met their end by my hand, thus far.

But now, we come to the title that everyone knows. Final Fantasy VI. The last of the so-called classic Final Fantasy titles and arguably the best of the entire series. Not only was it, undoubtedly, one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made but it was also one of the most technically advanced games ever released on the SNES.

No more playing around. Time to get serious.

Many of you who lived and gamed through the 16-bit era remember Nintendo and Sega blustering about with their made up technological terminology about why their console was better. Sega often talked about it's "Blast Processing" and the term 16-bits was even just a marketing term. Well, Nintendo often talked about it's Mode 7 capabilities. Without getting two technical, this was a method of background rendering that provided a 3D-ish effect. It was super early and honestly doesn't look all that great now but it was a huge achievement for the time.

FFVI Credits Sequence using Mode 7...

...compared to a standard cutscene, not using Mode 7.

My point in talking about this is twofold: one, I've wanted to talk about the technology behind Final Fantasy for many posts now and this is finally a good opportunity and two, Final Fantasy VI probably has the best Mode 7 effects of any game on the console. Ironic that although we often come back to this game for its classic feel, it was probably one of the strongest graphical powerhouses of its time.

Up until this point, each game (with the exception of Adventure) has been directed by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. Since he was promoted within Squaresoft, he wasn't able to direct Final Fantasy VI. This meant some fresh blood in a series already known for its extensive experimentation.While we lost the amazing job system from Final Fantasy V, we got the largest main cast of any game in the series to this date, some of the strongest character development, the introduction of equipable special items called relics (similar ideas are used in the next several installments, i.e. Materia in Final Fantasy VII), and the espers.

Don't forget the blatantly obvious Nazi reference!

I don't want to give a full review of the game already but suffice it to say that I've been looking forward to this one. I'm excited to see if the game holds up as well as I remember it from when I was a kid. Oh, and before I go, I feel the need to express my absolute fanboy nerd-gasm when I saw a good friend of mine who has copies of Final Fantasy 1-3 (US numbering) on the NES and SNES respectively, along with several other wonderful RPG's like Secret of Mana, Dragon Warrior 1 and 2, Chrono Trigger and many others. I've known this guy for years and had no idea he had one of the greatest classic game collections I've ever seen. So mad props to him and thanks for giving me my first taste of Contra and Super C!

Game on!

Die Tree, Die!

Game Over, 5!

Final Fantasy V on the SNES was never released in the US for the cited reason of being too difficult for US audiences. Despite the obvious condescension in this statement, I have to agree. This game is brutally difficult, particularly by the end. The game actively fights against grinding which is both good and bad for you.

Along with the standard levels, and probably more important overall, you have to level up each job individually. There is no penalty for switching jobs and doing so is encouraged. Leveling up the jobs doesn't improve your stats and actually, has very little benefit to that job at all. Instead, Job Levels provide you with access to that job's abilities while using other jobs. The more job levels, the stronger abilities you gain from that job.

This provides an extremely satisfying game of mix and match. Maybe you like your Red Mage to have access to Dimensional Magic (Time Magic) as well or maybe you want to specialize and have a Black Mage with full White Mage spells. If you level up Ninja, you can give your Knight the ability to dual wield two of the strongest swords in the game or the ability to dodge like a Samurai.

The possibilities are endless and immensely entertaining. Coming up with new combinations for each character and the party as a whole is easily the most fun aspect of all five Final Fantasy games so far.

It's everything else that makes Final Fantasy V a far worse experience than it could be. I'm all for hard games but there's a difference between challenging and just unfair. Challenging is when you face severe risk but using your intelligence and quick thinking, you can come up on top. Unfair is having enemies with a spell that kills you if you're the wrong level. Sure you could get lucky and simply not be affected by this. In fact, odds are you will be lucky. But luck shouldn't have anything to do with it. Other enemies will be able to absorb various elemental damage. This is fine for magic but by the end of the game, most weapons have an elemental affiliation and most aren't plainly expressed anywhere. Why does that make sense that a dagger to the gut would somehow heal an enemy rather than kill it? When you play against the risk of losing hours of gameplay with enemies that can kill your whole party the second the match starts or those enemies will be immune to your attacks, it stops making that risk worth it. 

Enemies also provide a ridiculously low reward relative to their difficulty. Sometimes you will face unbearably hard bosses who provide you with 0 gold or EXP while you'll fight a couple easy enemies that will give you thousands. It doesn't seem to make any sense but it always errs on the side of less. It's no coincidence that many of the top forum topics for this game are finding good areas to grind job levels.

Check out my last post to see my evaluation of the storyline. To summarize, the game doesn't get any better later. In fact, the ultimate goal of Exdeath, to flood the world with monsters, is perhaps the most cliche storyline in existence. Not only that but even this doesn't make sense by the games own logic. All of the big bad monsters have been stuck in the Void. Exdeath wants to free all of the monsters from the Void. To do this, he reunites the world which will bring the Void into the real world. To prevent anyone from stopping him, he brings everyone else into the Void. You recognize the problem here? All of the people who can stop the monsters are being brought to the monster's location. Even if Exdeath succeeds, it just moves everyone back outside. Nothing really seems to change...

And Exdeath is still a giant evil tree.

Don't get me wrong, the game isn't terrible. It's vicious and the story sucks but the job system literally makes the game entirely worth playing. The sense of satisfaction from getting the perfect combination of jobs and abilities is a lot of fun. The game isn't as strong as IV but the jobs alone beat out the NES trilogy.

Game Rankings:

Final Fantasy II < Final Fantasy Adventure < Final Fantasy < Final Fantasy III < Final Fantasy V < Final Fantasy IV

Game on!

My Final Post...

Just kidding! I know it probably seems like that since the time between posts has been getting longer and longer as time goes on. I've been struggling to find time as the wedding date gets closer and closer but I am still pushing my way through Final Fantasy V. Seriously, this is the longest game so far, but I'm finally in the last world, getting the super weapons to take down Exdeath.

So, I have to admit something. I know the quality of these blog posts have gone downhill recently. To be honest, I'm having a tougher time coming up with interesting things to write about while still avoiding spoilers for the games. Because of this, I've decided that I'm lifting the spoiler ban from here on out. I'm not going to intentionally spoil things for all of you just for the sake of spoiling things but this will allow some discussion regarding the actual story material of the games which is the bulk of Final Fantasy anyway. Since this series is older than I am, I figure that spoilers are around the internet anyway and it's unlikely that those of you who haven't played them yet and are reading Final Fantasy blogs don't know what's happened in pretty much all of these games.

The grand water of spoilers, reviving all it touches

My thoughts on Final Fantasy V so far have been that although the job system makes the gameplay the most interesting of all of them thus far, the storyline completely blows. There are four characters that you care nothing for throughout pretty much the entire game. Three of the characters stop their character development about halfway through the game and the fourth dies only to be replaced by a girl who cares for nothing other than the fact that the fourth character died.

The storyline has you established as the four warriors of light (or some derivation of such) who have to go around and protect the four crystals which are being destroyed. Too bad you fail miserably, as with every other Final Fantasy game, get transferred to another world and fail AGAIN.

I hope they never need to protect me...

So, by the end of the game, we have established that these four warriors are literally the worst heroes in all of gaming, failing at everything they try to accomplish. Oh, and what's the big evil force that's trying to stop them?

Well, that makes sense

That's right. Exdeath is really an evil tree out to destroy the world. An evil... tree. As is becoming of the most evil plant in all of existence, Exdeath is a failure as a villain as well. Sure he's big, bad and powerful but he's perhaps the dumbest villain possible. By the time you get to the third world, he shows his ultimate power by sucking entire cities into a giant void, erasing them from the world. But what does he do to the four warriors? Well, he gives them a giant naked woman to fight, of course!

Are those snakes? You know what? I don't even want to know.

It would just make way too much sense to suck them into the void along with everyone else. No, he has to give them the naked chick. Oh and if that weren't dumb enough, along with this boss, he gives them their party member back that was lost in the void. Because Final Fantasy V.

So, that's where I'm at right now. The story is absolutely absurd and I really don't see it getting better anytime soon. So, I'm hopefully going to be able to defeat the evil tree tonight and end this game but we'll see what happens.

Game on!

Superbosses

I admit that I wavered a bit on my Final Fantasy goals. My brother's staying with me for a while and we decided to bust out some old Sega Genesis games from our childhood. Toejam and Earl may sound like the worst duo ever but to us, it brings back waves of nostalgia. That and some quality time with the Starbound beta (13 hours to be precise) have left me rejuvenated and ready to continue my voyage through Final Fantasy V.

I like to think that schoolyard rumor-mongering about games still goes on today like it did before but I know the internet has quelled a lot of that discussion and debate. Still, many of you have probably heard about the horrors of Final Fantasy bosses like the Emerald and Ruby Weapons of Final Fantasy VII or Vercingetorix from Final Fantasy XIII. These post-game bosses are known for being the greatest challenges these games have to offer. They are almost always significantly harder than the final boss of the game and usually require close to, if not completely, max levels for all party members to even challenge properly but they also can drop significant rewards.

Technically speaking, Final Fantasy V was the first in the series to feature a real Superboss but there were similar encounters in a couple of the earlier games. I have to admit, going forward, that I never fought these creatures and thus, do not have screenshots of these encounters. I have fought a few tough fights in V so far but since I'm still working through the game, I haven't fought a proper superboss yet. Here are the encounters from the earlier titles:

Final Fantasy

When the picture gets bigger, he almost looks intimidating!

Ooooh yeah. Enjoy that 8-bit sexiness. This guy is the Warmech and is the closest thing Final Fantasy has to a superboss.  This guy is a rare encounter that only happens on the bridge to fighting Tiamat, the last of the four fiends. According to the Final Fantasy Wiki, this foe is "extremely powerful, rivaling Chaos himself in some versions of the game..." Although this guy apparently only "rivals" the final boss, you have to fight him a whole dungeon earlier, making him a likely candidate for the hardest battle in the game. The remakes even make him stronger, adding constant regeneration to his health.

Final Fantasy II

Watch how you hold that sword, mister.

Another rare encounter rather than a traditional superboss, this guy is known as the Iron Giant. That may sound familiar which is probably because he's shown up in other Final Fantasy games as well! In fact, he shows up in II, III and IV as well as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Final Fantasy Dimensions. In III and IV though, he's only in the remakes of the game, not the originals. This guy's HP actually isn't that high but his defense is insane, meaning that it's very difficult to do any real damage to him. Still, if you can defeat him repeatedly, you have a chance to get the full Genji armor set and multiples of the XCalibur.

As we get further into the games, I'll post more on the superbosses and see if I can't add a few stories of my own to the mix. Since I am going for completion of the games on a timetable, I may not have the time to devote to grinding up to fighting these guys but I'll see what I can do.

Game on!

Game List Editing

So as some of you may know, I am going to be getting married on June 27th of this year. I'm super excited about this but I've realized that this kind of gives me a soft deadline for my Final Fantasy run through since we also may be moving cross country. While I'll still be able to play, I won't have nearly enough time to devote to such a massive undertaking and so, I've made the hard choice to edit down my list of games to play. Basically, I cut games that weren't really relevant to the Final Fantasy canon as a whole. Games that didn't contribute much to the series and thus are less important waypoints on the way through the series. I've also cut both online games due to the large amount of time they would take to complete fully. So, here is the updated game list:

-Final Fantasy (1987)
-Final Fantasy II (1988)
-Final Fantasy III (1990)
-Final Fantasy IV (1991)
-Final Fantasy Adventure (1991)
-Final Fantasy V (1992) < - You are here!
-Final Fantasy VI (1994)
-Final Fantasy VII (1997)
-Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)
-Final Fantasy VIII (1999)
-Final Fantasy IX (2000)
-Final Fantasy X (2001)
-Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (2003)
-Final Fantasy X-2 (2003)
-Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus (2006)
-Final Fantasy XII (2006)
-Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (2007)
-Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (2007)
-Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift (2007)
-Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (2008)
-Final Fantasy XIII (2009)
-Dissidia: Final Fantasy (2009)
-Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (2009)
-Final Fantasy Dimensions (2010)
-Final Fantasy XIII-2 (2011)
-Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy (2011)
-Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy (2012)
-Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (2013)

There are a few games still on the list that are on the chopping block too, that I may have to cut if time runs short. These are the Tactics Advance games, XII: Revenant Wings, Dirge of Cerberus, The 4 Heroes of Light and Dimensions, not necessarily in that order. I'd like to keep all these games in as I feel they all have something significant to add to the timeline but I'd rather get through all the core series than play those and miss something like XIII.

Now of course, this is a soft deadline, meaning when June 27th rolls around, that doesn't necessarily mean I'll be done here. I'll still be gaming of course, it'll just be a matter of not really being able to put in 10-12 hours at a time. But if I'm still working through IX come June, I'll probably cut a few so that I'm not spending our honeymoon busting out Final Fantasy. Can't say the fiancee would likely appreciate that much!

I'll try and talk a bit about the games that I've passed over such as Mystic Quest and the Crystal Chronicles games but I will not be doing playthroughs of those games. Frankly, Mystic Quest was commercially and critically panned and the Crystal Chronicles are ultra-repetitive dungeon crawlers with some multiplayer thrown in. They aren't terrible games but they aren't great either. I'm not just basing their removal on how good they are, though. They also didn't contribute much to the franchise as a whole, not like the ones listed did. Even Dirge of Cerberus, one of the worst rated games in the series marked a huge departure for Final Fantasy, being the first non-RPG Final Fantasy and the first sequel to Final Fantasy VII, the game that everyone thought they wanted.

Anyway, I wanted to share that news with you before I venture into the second world of Final Fantasy V.

As always,
Game on!

It's a Great Time to be a Final Fantasy Fan

Still working my way through Final Fantasy V but I want to take a quick detour here and come back to the present for a bit. It's the year 2013. Final Fantasy is everywhere. Square-Enix has finally buckled and given us what we always asked for, direct sequels to Final Fantasy and apparently, the flood gates have opened and there is no closing them again. Many fans wonder about the future of the series and for the first time in 25 years, people are seriously questioning whether the series even should have a future.

It's impossible to do a blog like this and not be faced with the question: Is Final Fantasy dead? Am I just trying to reach the end of an already completed story? Now obviously Final Fantasy is still going on. XV is in development now, Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn is still bringing new content to the table and they're pumping out mobile games like babies in a crack den. But many fans say that the Final Fantasy that they grew up with is no more.

Let me go on record right now by saying that there has never been a better time to be a Final Fantasy fan. If you're questioning the future of the game, it's because you aren't looking in the right places. Let's start off with the classic games. Final Fantasy was great on the SNES and NES but let's be honest, the cartridges were really hard to find and cartridges were just a brutal medium, often succumbing to dust, damaged connections and other errors. Nowadays, all of the classic Final Fantasy games are available online including all of the fan translated games that were missed in the US. Even if you are anti-emulator, sites like ebay and half.com make it easy to find the original cartridges for relatively reasonable prices.

Past the SNES, 7-9 are available on PSN and 7 and 8 are also available on Steam now, all for really quite cheap. 10 and 10-2 are being remastered for the PS3 and the rest aren't that hard to find. All the games are getting ported to every console imaginable, too. Almost every handheld device including mobiles, GBA, DS, 3DS all have Final Fantasy games available. In fact, if you have a iPhone or Android device, you can get every Final Fantasy game through V right there, including IV: The After Years. I wouldn't be surprised if a few months down the line, VI will be available as well. Anyway, the classic games are easy to find now.

Fans were mixed when XIII was released. The fighting system was often lauded but many people cried foul about the extreme linear nature of the game that literally just had you walking down a path through the vast majority of the game. Even the open world felt blah and empty. The storyline was a major departure for Final Fantasy, telling the majority of the story through text and flashbacks while you played the aftermath of events that have already taken place. While many found it boring, it was an interesting experiment, if nothing else. Anyway, I'm getting off-topic here. Some loved XIII and many hated it. If you loved it, great, you got a sequel and another one on the way.

If you hated it, you may feel like you've been left out to dry. You're likely a fan of the older games and felt that XIII had way too much hand-holding. You're in luck, however. Square-Enix has not forgotten you, although you may feel like they have. Check out your phone and pull up Final Fantasy Dimensions. This game released to almost zero hype or fanfare but was literally a game designed with the mindset of create another SNES Final Fantasy. While it was originally episodic and I believe the App Store still sells it in episodes, the game is complete and Android users just pay once for the whole game. It's not a perfect game but it's still pretty good, fitting in perfectly alongside the SNES classics. The only thing that drives me crazy about it is that there is no native support for gamepads so you'll need to root in order to get a 360 controller to work with it.

Moving on over to the Nintendo handhelds, many people missed Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light on the DS. If you did and don't feel like moving backwards, I highly recommend grabbing your 3DS and checking out the demo for Bravely Default. Don't be confused by the title, this is Final Fantasy in every regard. It's actually a spiritual successor to 4 Heroes of Light and was made with Final Fantasy V in mind. The job system is a blast and it makes great use of Streetpass to add some interactivity. A co-worker and I played the demo at the same time and we had a great time sharing information about dungeons and equipment and job abilities. It felt like being a kid again.

If you ask me, the SNES was the greatest console ever made. No matter how great 3D graphics get, I feel at home with those well crafted sprites. As a JRPG fan, the SNES was heaven, granting us games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV, V and VI, Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, etc. Still, games have evolved a great deal since then and much of that evolution is for the better. While you may have been driven to cynicism long ago, Final Fantasy XV looks great. Being developed from the ground up by the team who made Kingdom Hearts, I have high, high hopes for this game, which is more than I can say for XIII. Maybe you aren't a fan of Kingdom Hearts, that's fine. The battle system is still great, feeling quick and lively without ever dropping the difficulty meter. If you think that it'll be Final Fantasy easy mode, try playing Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 on the hardest difficulty. It's far from impossible but it'll definitely make you work for your win.

I haven't seen much about the storyline but it seems to be taking more of a Final Fantasy Tactics approach which makes me a bit concerned. No game since Final Fantasy Tactics has really done that well. Tactics Advance, A2 and XII all took place in that same universe but none of them really captured that same magic. Coming from the Kingdom Hearts director too, I fear that the storyline will stray deep into the realm of ridiculousness like KH did long ago.

Final Fantasy has been hitting some rough patches lately, killing a lot of the blind faith we once had in Square-Enix. Horrendous sequels such as Dirge of Cerberus and X-2 have been the gift we asked for but didn't realize we didn't want. XIII strayed far from Final Fantasy and made us question the direction the series was taking. Still, this is far from the end for the series. Final Fantasy was a series born from hopelessness, created out of a last-ditch effort by a company on the brink of toppling. It was the phoenix fire that helped Square to rise again and become the single greatest name in the RPG genre. Let's look at Final Fantasy XIV. The game was released and was instantly panned for being an absolute mess. They tried updates and patches but it just wasn't enough. Rather than sitting on their laurels and letting XIV live or die as it would, they ended up scrapping the whole project and re-released what is arguably one of the best MMO's on the market today. Sure it had it's rough patches but Square-Enix made it through. Final Fantasy made it through. XIV refused to be left in the dust and instead became reborn as something worthy of the name. I have hope that the Final Fantasy series will continue strong for many iterations to come.

Game on!

I'm still here!

Hey everyone! The holidays took up a ton of time for me so I wasn't able to post for a while. Worry not, I am still here and the trek shall continue. I have spent a few hours with Final Fantasy V on the SNES and I'm cautiously optimistic so far.

We're back in the realm of fan translations which, I've gotta say, I'm really enjoying. Being a purist, it's hard for me to say that  I prefer the fan-led projects but seeing as how awful the localization has been on ever Final Fantasy up to this point, the fans just do a better job.

I really do want to give a quick shout-out to these fans. See, even now, JRPG fans who don't speak Japanese have it pretty tough. Frequently, only the biggest franchises get ported over to the US as these niche audiences usually aren't enough to justify the cost of a proper localization team. We thankfully have companies like Atlus, XSEED and others who are willing to do this, as well as the major titles from Namco-Bandai and Square-Enix, but many, MANY games get left in the dust. Look at the relatively recent debacle regarding Xenoblade Chronicles, Pandoras Tower and The Last Story. Particularly Xenoblade Chronicles, this game was one of the highest rated JRPGs to come out in years yet it was initially not going to be brought to the US. Operation Rainfall thankfully stood up and helped bring it over but many games don't get the same treatment.

Anyway, for us niche fans, we are reliant on those selfless folks who devote countless hours translating every single line of dialogue in a game with only the promise of fan donations as compensation. Without them, we would never be able to play the original versions of games like Final Fantasy 2, 3 and 5. Other games like Valkyria Chronicles 3, Terranigma, the many Tales games never released in the US would also be lost to us. So a huge thank you to you folks for your hard work. Without you, this journey would not be possible.

"Boco, why is everything all black???"

Final Fantasy V. This was the follow up to the huge success that was Final Fantasy IV. While Final Fantasy was obviously doing pretty well three games in, IV really cemented it's place as the leading series in the JRPG genre. It also did very well over in the states under the name Final Fantasy II. So how do they follow up such a smash hit game?

Well, they take the storyline that everyone loved from IV and meld it with the job system from III. Oh yeah, and make the game hard as balls. Yes, the rumors you heard are true, the cited reason that Square gave for why they didn't bring this game to the states is that it was just too hard. Thankfully, many gamers, like myself, took this as a challenge and made the SNES rom one of the highest downloaded SNES roms in the early 2000's. 

Look at their originality. JRPG characters with amnesia.

Although Final Fantasy V improved on several things from it's predecessor, it is commonly regarded as a low-point for the classic Final Fantasy games. Many reviewers don't like the storyline or the characters, calling it all tried and true. The job system is still lauded as being one of the most important developments in the series' long history, but the game is usually called merely passable.

In some ways, I think it gets a bad rap and in other ways, I agree, so far. One of the best parts of Final Fantasy IV was the interesting and changing boss fights. Bosses were rarely just the run-of-the-mill, beat them up till they die, type fights. They commonly changed tactics in the middle of fights and required you to do the same. The fight against Dark Cecil is one of the most highly regarded boss fights in gaming history but many of the other fights are memorable as well, really utilizing the ATB system to keep you on your toes and really ramp up the tension during these encounters. So far, Final Fantasy V has not done this very effectively. It's wonderful being able to now see the ATB progress so you can better plan characters moves but the boss battles haven't been very interesting at all, up to this point. One interesting fight pits you against a monster who changes between living and undead status which is cool but it's an obvious switch and stands out as the only boss to do anything mid-battle. 

I still have quite a ways to go but I do enjoy the game so far. It may not be as revolutionary as IV or VI but it's still an SNES Final Fantasy game and has been plenty enjoyable to me thus far.

Boco doesn't like being left behind! Boco charge!

Game on!