Ush's big FF-games-on-the-Playstation review thread!

Originally posted by General Kaliero
It's funny... reading all your complaints about VIII, Ush, makes me really want to not play it, but then you come back at the end saying that it's actually worth playing. Mixed messages, y'know?

IV came out last week? 'the hell? I though it wasn't scheduled for release until tomorrow... I could be playing the updated version of IV right now, and no one told me?!

And yeah, III is coming to the DS... or at least the story is. Square Enix is rebuilding the game from the ground up to make it 3D, so it's more of a re-imagining than a re-release.

But don't get too excited yet. It's only scheduled for a Japan release so far.

Makes you wonder, though... maybe the reason III has never made it over here is because it contains some horrible Japanese secret... anti-America propaganda, maybe? 😛

South Park.

'Bomb the harbor, bomb the harbor, bomb the harbor'
tomcat

Originally posted by General Kaliero
Makes you wonder, though... maybe the reason III has never made it over here is because it contains some horrible Japanese secret... anti-America propaganda, maybe? 😛

Originally posted by General Kaliero
Makes you wonder, though... maybe the reason III has never made it over here is because it contains some horrible Japanese secret... anti-America propaganda, maybe? 😛

Originally posted by JKozzy
Nah, we'd know by now. Fan-translated FFIII roms float around, someone would've found out in like, what, 14, 15 years? 😛

I have a fan-translated rom of FFIII 😄

Haven't started playing it yet though.

Where's our FFIX review!? *Towel whips Ush!*

Squall sucks! SEIFER rocks! They should kept him in the damn party. Instead of Irvine. Dude was useless.

Too bad you couldn't have Edea in your party longer. She was awesome.

The only useful members were Rinoa (I HATED her but her Limit Breaks rocked...) Zell (first gay character in the Final Fantasy series, with the most powerful limit break as well) and Squall.

Quistis' Blue Magic wasn't powerful and was a pain to find.
Selphie was damn near useless in the latter parts of the game (Full-cure was essential in the earlier parts.) except for THE END. But that was really cheap to use.
Irvine was useless. Period. His Limit Breaks were poor. Even at max level. His Pulse Ammo took damn forever to use.

After a busy week… onwards to FFIX! Well, the vibe I had heard about this one is that it was superior to the one before, and that some even preferred it to VII on the grounds that it was more in keeping with the roots of the series. Earlier memories of mine remember the original tv ads for FFVIII that really pushed the realism aspect hard, and five years ago when I saw screenshots of FFIX I was already struck by how different the style was; the first time the 3-d engine introduced in VII had been used to create deliberately cutesy characters (as opposed to VII’s ‘artistic’ impression of each character, and VIII’s realistic look).

Well, it must be said, the style change made this game a hard sell to me- as I outline above, I was actually quite a fan of the slightly grittier style of VIII (after all, VIII was far from being, say, a Tarantino movie; it was hardly over-the-top with its realism). In fact, IX goes absolutely hardcore in a direction I don’t like- kiddy characters, twee surroundings, in parts of the game, a very Children’s Fairy tale feel to it; not the sort of thing I felt like playing after VIII. Still, it would be a crime to be so totally put off a series like this by style, so I gave it a go anyway.

Indeed it is very true that this game is much closer to the FF series roots. Items and how they work and equip were instantly familiar to me from my time on the earlier SNES games. In fact, I think they took it too far- the old inventory screen is exactly the same as the old FF games, and I was quickly reminded just how much better VIII’s flick-screen inventory was than the endless-scroll version of the earlier games, here faithfully recreated to a fault. Still, a minor quibble. The game’s style is classic FF- basically Fantasy, but with a few technological intrusions.

So then, the plot. First of all, I should comment that the game actually takes you through multiple-viewpoints set-ups for the plot rather than making everything happen to the main protagonist. This worked rather well, I thought. Nonetheless, there is such a protagonist, and his name is Zidane, a monkey-tailed young thief. Hmm. Not a concept that pitches well to me, must be said (“Ah geez, he’s got a freaking TAIL…” was my first reaction). Zidane is part of a faux group of actors who go around on a flying ship (powered by a strange substance called Mist, after which the starting continent is named). This is cover for their thievery, though it seems they are branching out a little as they have taken up a mission of kidnapping the Princess of Alexandria, which is where they are flying to as the game begins. Zidane is slightly surprised to find that the Princess Garnet actually WANTS to be kidnapped, which at least makes that part of the operation easier, though getting that far was complex. Caught up in this mess is the strange child Vivi, who looks curiously exactly like the old Black Mages from earlier FF games, and indeed is developing the powers of such a being, though no explanation is offered for this at first.

Pursued by the Queen’s Knight Steiner (in permanent competition with his female counterpart Beatrix), all are on board the flying ship when it is shot down by the orders of the heartless Queen as it tries to make its escape. Zidane has been rather taken by the Princess (who, wanting to escape her mother whom she suspects of doing evil things, re-names herself ‘Dagger’) and goes off to help her when she finds herself in trouble in the forest the ship crashed in, and so the game pans out from there. The confused young Vivi- basically searching for answers about who he is- tags along with Zidane for companionship, whilst Steiner sees Zidane as nothing but a common thief and is trying to protect the Princess at all times. Eventually, of course, Steiner comes to realise that the Queen he serves is indeed very evil, but this early part of the game before that point is actually a very big one.

Fleeing to the largest city on the continent, ‘Dagger’ makes contact with the Regent Cid (as any FF fan knows, the name ‘Cid’ turns up in every FF game), a relation of hers, to talk over her fears, only for it to turn out that Cid had ordered the kidnapping precisely because he had fears too and wanted to get Garnet/Dagger away from her mother. However, despite these early actions from the good guys, events soon begin to overtake the characters. Having already observed by accident during their journey the creation of an army of black mages similar to Vivi (but larger, i.e. more adult), the characters can only watch as Queen Brahne’s army soon starts to take over the continent- supported by the power of Guardian Forces, the essence of which were extracted from Dagger herself, who apparently has the potential to summon such forces. Whole cities are destroyed in this mass destruction. The characters are joined by the veteran female Lancer Freya, and another contender for the ‘most annoying gobshite’ award in the form of Quina, an incredibly obscure monster-eating chef (complete with chef’s hat and apron that he fights with, as well as his combat fork. Hum.) who has no redeeming dramatic value whatsoever and simply acted to annoy the hell out of me.

Fleeing to another continent in a desperate attempt to destroy the source of the Mist (that is needed to perpetuate the Black Mage army), the characters find the Village of the Summoners, inside they find the young girl Eiko, who also has the potential to summon Guardian Forces (though it must be said, I found it very disconcerting to be controlling a six-year old, though I suppose it fits into the odd Japanese style of things). Eiko says she is the last of her kind, but joins the party to help them destroy the source of the Mist- also helped by bounty hunter Amarat, who has personal issues with Squall (and is also the sullen grumpy one, which goes to show that Squall was ok as a character-just not as the MAIN character).

However, the bad guy behind the war, who supplied the weapons to Brahne, is a man named Kujo. In a large battle with the Queen, whom he has now parted ways with, Kujo shows the unusual ability to cal something called ‘Invincible’ which seems to have the power to take over Guardian forces when summoned- this is the end of Brahne, and also the end of Alexandria when he pulls the same trick against the Guardian Force Alexander later on.

Soon the players are concentrating their efforts against Kujo before he (obviously) destroys the world. Eventually it turns out that both Zidane and Kujo are creations of a being named Garland, who is from another planet, as part of a plan for that planet to absorb the life energies of the game world and so perpetuate itself- a plan which involes the removal of the Guardian Forces first. Kujo eventually deposes Garland, however, and goes on a crazy-kill rampage of is own (this si starting to sound familiar). The players must eventually stop Kujo before he destroys all… err, and they do.

Well, the plot is better than VIII, but it still trips over itself in several areas, and so it is prevented from being as good as VII- hardly as if VII had the most intelligent and thoughtful and perfect plot of all time, but by concentrating on a few simple dramatic dilemmas it did very well. IX’s plot is suffering from a similar problem to VIII- that of inadequately explored complication- but to nowhere near the same degree.

The main problem is- although he is present, which is more than can be said for Ultimecia- is that Kujo is a very un-engaging bad guy, simply an annoying ponce who you have no decent understanding of- nor any motivation to do so. Sephiroth was built up well in VII; Kujo is kinda crowbared suddenly into the storyline and never really interests you. He is also followed by another boss out of nowhere after you kill him, whom you have even less interest in.

Other problems really come down to plot coherency- the whole phenomena if Invincible taking over the summoned creatures isn’t properly followed through and so ended up being unnecessary- as was Garland, who also had an irritatingly similar name to Garnet. Queen Brahne is an engaging bad guy, in a pantomime sense (she really could have been the evil fairy godmother), but is arbitrarily killed off out of nowhere in favour of the far less interesting Kujo.

And… well, the plot- despite having good dramatic measures, likely providing some early assassins who chase after the characters to provide dramatic momentum- just doesn’t flow together as well as VII’s does. But- it is far from a disastrous plot, and it is certainly enough to keep you playing, unlike VIII where I ended playing DESPITE the plot.

The characters, meanwhile, despite the annoying ones, have been well-constructed in terms of characterisation. Despite being a child, Vivi is an engaging character. Dagger and Freya are relatively boring but reasonable enough. Steiner is very good indeed- comically gruff and angry at all times, and enjoys a fantastically strained relationship with Zidane throughout, returning character conflict to the heart of the set-up which works very well, much better than the “everyone seems to mysteriously like Squall” problem from VIII.

Zidane himself is an all around good guy- brave , impetuous, ill-disciplined, honourable, true etc. The sort of hero plenty of people really love to love, and I certainly had no issue with him, though he didn’t exactly catch me as such- though I know people for who, he is their favourite FF character. No matter what your view on him, I think you would have to have brain damage to think he is not better than Squall.

Ok- onto the system. Well, still too many powers, too many resistances, too many random encounters, blah blah blah blah blah. However, I was surprised to find that despite some improvements, IX actually really irritated me, system wise.

First, the good news- character development is MUCH better. Each character has a pre-set, unchangeable class. That’s a simple option that can be bettered but in its simplicity is much better than in the last two games- characters truly feel distinctive (though to my mind, Zidane was too good a fighter- it is good that finally the big sword guy is not the main character, yet Zidane often easily dealt out as much damage as the fighters (Steiner and Freya) did). The most important thing is that the fighter can fight, the Mage can spell cast, and you can’t just chop and change their skill sets. The only problem with fixed classes is that you tend to feel you are following a pre-set line with a character rather than developing him/her yourself, but this is preferable to the personality loss of VII and VIII. I still rather liked the class system from V, though.

Special powers this time are effectively ‘extracted’ according to which items you are wielding. This is rather odd, but it does mean you are faced with a strategic choice of equipping with better gear, or waiting with old stuff until you have learned the ability related to it. Different characters all have different potential abilities, and the system works well- there is no possibility of interchange. Also, you never have to pick potential combat options for someone, each person has one fighting ability and one special ability (Magic for Mages, stealing for Zidane, etc.) and this works great- no more deprivation of being able to use items because you wanted to use other powers- and certainly no more damn Drawing; Square clearly realised their mistake and made everything run off good ol’ Magic Points again.

Meanwhile, you have a whole host of other characters you control at various times, which is all rather neat and adds to the variety of things. You are also back up to four characters at a time, which tactically speaking I much prefer. Furthermore, for most of the first half of the game, the plot in any case explores multiple storylines so you follow the fortunes of two different parties and need not make choices about who to leave and who to include anyway- again, I found this a good thing.

But what didn’t I like? Well…and I suppose this is only a personal opinion, but ir really is a very strong one… something seems to have gone very wrong with the timing of the combat system.

First of all, everything seems much slower, even with the speed turned up. That’s really not helpful, because you are starting from a position of irritating random encounters in the first place; slowing down the pace of combat compounds that problem. And it is yet further compounded by the fact that animations seem to be getting longer (though the GF ones can now be sped up, thank God- unskippable cutscenes are one of the things I hate mos tin ANY game that includes them- I think it is a cardinal rule that the player should never be made to sit through a cut scene if he/she does not wish as it detracts from gameplay- especially as he might have seen said scene a dozen times already. GF animations were pretty much cut scenes in of themselves). And just to make it worse, there are these occasional pauses after attacks or before them- especially from monsters- which further contribute to making the fighting a drudge rather than joy.

And it still gets worse. A hideous mistake is that time continues to pass during animations. This is totally ridiculous on so many levels. For a start, it meant that my characters with Haste were often no faster than the ones without (including the enemies without) because the various animations took so long that the person who last acted was ready to act again by the time the person currently acting had finished his/her animation, so everyone acted in order regardless of being hasted or not, which is silly. Not quite as silly, though, as the spells that kill you after a certain amount of time has passed- which means if you are stuck in a string og long animations, that character dies before you can do anything about it. If you are lucky enough to not be in such a string, you might end the fight before the countdown runs out. What kind of retarded system has your fortunes based upon how long the animations are taking?

And still worse- it takes so long for anything to get done, that I had forgotten what I had told people to do by the time they got around to doing it. Everything seemed so sloooooooooooow… an unwelcome new status feature (as if the game needed any more) affects a character by making them die if they take any actions. That condition is spectacularly pointless-s it may as well just kill any character not immune to the effect, because chances are the affected character is already going to act because of an order you gave him what seemed like hours ago, and can’t cancel. You can’t wait for animations to finish before issuing orders under clearer circumstances either- because, as time is passing during them, this just lets all the bad guys act before you.

It’s terrible- it really ruined the combat for me, and I know I am not the only one exasperated by the timing problem; our gracious computer mod Lana stopped playing FF IX exactly because of the irritating, prolonged fights. My FFVIII review mentions how combat had a good ‘feel’ in the game- combat here only ever irritated me immensely. Oh, and the ‘work out what you need to fight a boss by trying and losing and re-loading’ syndrome has, if anything, gotten stronger- bad mistake.

In fact, the game kept throwing irritations at me. Take Beatrix, for example. She is a legendary fighter, at first working for the evil Queen out of duty. Each time you meet her, she wipes the floor with you due to her superior skills. However, when she spontaneously changes sides (depriving you of the opportunity to finally beat her, which was annoying in of itself), imagine my irritation to find out that when you control her, my other characters were actually already BETTER than she is now- despite having only just had the party wiped out by her again a few seconds earlier when she was a bad guy. This kind of stupid buggering around- the sudden de-powering of a built up character just because she has joined your side- is the kind of thing that breaks suspension of disbelief, because it is such a powerful non-sequitur. Beatrix is not under your control for long, so why be shy? In VII, when Sephiroth is in your party for Cloud’s flashback, they don’t shy away at all from making him as hard as he should be, and that works much better, The fact that Beatrix’s side changing apparently makes her now not accountable for the part she played in allowing countless thousands of people to be killed seems like a trivial matter in comparison- but that bugged me as well.

And the cardgame. FFVIII’s (with the exception of the truly dumb random rule) had a cardgame that was quick and easy to learn and fun to play. IX makes it a central point that no-one really knows the rules of how the cardgame works. Huh? As if I really want to put so much effort into learning something that is, after all, effectively irrelevant.

I would also IX seems to be not up to part in the area of sidequests- there is a big treasure hunting chocobo one, but that didn’t engage me at all, the others are sparse.

Anyway, I don’t want to go on moaning, but basically it often seemed that the game was going out of its way to annoy me when it didn’t have to. Ah well. So…

… in conclusion, I think I can say this. VII did a lot of things right. The main things wrong with VII weren’t wrong with VII as such, they are problems with the whole FF system- Materia being the exception, I think.

IX improves a lot on VII in this general respect- but for everything it got right, it seemed to make something else not as good also. Hmm.

I prefer VII simply because of IX’s style, which is not to my taste. As a GAME, IX is no worse- it is very well produced and its good points far outweigh its bad. But two games on from VII, you would rather have something better than something which is only as good. And I think a lot of IX’s negative points are ones that could easily have been eliminated- a shame.

So! That’s me done. Everyone tells me to try X. Tempting! But impossible unless I buy a console, which is unlikely. Sadly, especially after the fantastic success of third generation emulation, emulation of the 4th gen consoles (PS2, Gamecube etc.) on the PC is in a pitiful state, and I reckon it will be at least a year before PS2 games are playable on a PC in this manner.

But… it’s not quite the end yet. In the course of my FF playing, I discovered the existence of Final Fantasy Tactics- and am playing through it now. Much more my sort of game, it must be said, and the plot is very solid indeed- but it is far from without its problems.

Review for that coming soon!

Yeah! FFT is fun! Can't wait for that review.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
So! That’s me done. Everyone tells me to try X. Tempting! But impossible unless I buy a console, which is unlikely. Sadly, especially after the fantastic success of third generation emulation, emulation of the 4th gen consoles (PS2, Gamecube etc.) on the PC is in a pitiful state, and I reckon it will be at least a year before PS2 games are playable on a PC in this manner.

But… it’s not quite the end yet. In the course of my FF playing, I discovered the existence of Final Fantasy Tactics- and am playing through it now. Much more my sort of game, it must be said, and the plot is very solid indeed- but it is far from without its problems.

Review for that coming soon!

FFX isn't a bad game IMO. But I liked Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9 better.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a pretty fun game for the original Playstation. But the hardest part is starting out. Or at least it was for me. The version for Game boy advance was a lot of fun. The only complaint I had with that one, was the music. The music had a tendency to get extremely annoying. And the Multi player options were awful.

Tactics is awesome, a very very underrated game.

Though, I've never beaten it. I've played through it about 3 times trying to beat it, and each time I got to a certain point and my memory card would just erase itself, really upsetting because I loved that game.

One think about IX and it's slow combat- I think it was done for balance reasons. Seeing as you could have 4 members in your party instead of 3, having a delay made combat a little more difficult. Had the combat been swift, battles would have been very easy and probably faster then they wished. The delay between instruction to action was annoying though, but I got used to it after a few hours.

Also, because you had 4 members instead of 3, dying was rarely as devistating as in the previous two games. I noticed characters would die in combat a lot more often in IX then in 7 or 8, but I didn't even care because I have 3 characters, any of which could resurect the fallen party member.

Plaaaaaaay FFX!!!!!!

And yes indeed it was the slowness of the battles that caused me to quit FFIX....almost exactly four years ago......and I have yet to pick it back up again.

I did suspect the character number caused the change, but going back to VI shows that it was far better managed there.

Yeah, that's because FF6 was damn near perfection. They probably also wanted to try and give a more strategic feel to the game, so you'd have to think ahead before issuing any commands.

Still slowed it down waaaaaaay too much.