Of the first three games in the series, this is the playthrough I thought would be the most interesting- and for a lot of reasons it was. Of the ‘NES Trilogy’, Final Fantasy III is undoubtedly the best game, and the one that has the most in common with later entries in the series. This is to its credit though, and although it has its flaws, Final Fantasy III is actually a pretty good game.

It seems that Squaresoft had heard the criticism of Final Fantasy II, and they heard it well. The retarded levelling system from FF2 was scrapped, as was the magic system, the dialogue system, and the concept of player characters with names and personalities. The blank-slate characters you had to name yourself were back from FF1, as were character classes or ‘jobs’ as the series calls them. The return of the jobs was one thing, but Final Fantasy III added the ability for the player to change the characters jobs at any time. This opened up a massive amount of flexibility with the gameplay. Up against a boss with really high defence? Change your Warrior into a Black Mage for the fight, then change him back afterwards! For its time, the job system was unlike anything in any other RPG, and the system would return and be expanded upon later in Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Somehow, Squaresoft head honcho Hironobu Sakaguchi managed to lure the lead Final Fantasy II designer Akitoshi Kawazu away from Final Fantasy III and replace him with the designers responsible for the first game. Despite the fact that Final Fantasy III was more popular than the first two games, and it was widely regarded as one of the best games for the NES, Final Fantasy III didn’t leave Japan until it was remade for the Nintendo DS a few years ago. For over a decade, Final Fantasy III went unplayed and unnoticed by the majority of the world- which is a shame, because its a far better game than the first two entries in the series.

Much like the first game, Final Fantasy III tells the story of four youths known as the Warriors of Light, who embark on a quest to rid the world of the evil threatening to destroy it. The four youths are orphans from the village of Ur, who one day stumble upon a cave which houses one of the four Elemental Crystals. The crystal grants the player the ability to change the characters jobs at will, and instructs the orphans to use their new found power to restore peace to the world. Because y’know. It’s one of those crystals that can talk.

I’m actually not going to tell you about the characters this time- purely because the Warriors of Light are unnamed and without personalities, leaving the player to decide what they’re like. There are some minor characters that appear throughout the story, but they are just that- minor characters. There is a certain character that is worthy of mention, however. But for the wrong reason.

The final boss of the game is a manifestation of pure evil called the Cloud of Darkness, which takes the shape of a green humanoid woman. What makes the Cloud of Darkness worthy of noting is the fact that until you fight her at the very end of the game, she isn’t seen or even mentioned at all. For the majority of the game the villain is a man named Xande, who you defeat at the end of the game, only to have the Cloud of Darkness appear out of nowhere and declare that she is going to destroy existence… because… well, she’s evil. That’s it.

The concept of having Xande revealed to be a puppet to the Cloud of Darkness at the last goddamn minute feels somewhat cheap- and it certainly is. Final Fantasy III may just be the first game to utilize the concept of a final boss appearing from nowhere with no explanation- a trend now known as “pulling a Necron”, a trend named after the infamous last boss from Final Fantasy IX; an incarnation of death that like the Cloud of Darkness, appears out of nowhere at the last minute to try and eradicate existence as we know it. When you go through a game as long and as fucking difficult as Final Fantasy III, having the last boss feel like some last-minute tack on is more than a little frustrating.

The Cloud of Darkness as she appears in Dissidia: Final Fantasy

Squaresoft be hatin’

Which brings me to another thing- this game is fucking hard. Final Fantasy III is the hardest game in the series by a very wide margin, and considering how brutal the first two can be at times, that’s pretty damn hard. I usually enjoy a challenging game but man, this was ridiculous. If it weren’t for the magic of savestates, I honestly have no idea how I would have made it through the final dungeon in this.

Those of you familiar with the series but who missed Final Fantasy III might want to know that the only place you could save the game was on the world map. Save Points weren’t introduced until Final Fantasy IV, so if you got stuck in the middle of a dungeon you were faced with a very difficult choice on whether to press on to the end or retreat back to the entrance. You couldn’t just hope to stumble upon a Save Point in the middle of a cave, because it just wasn’t going to happen. It’s also worth noting that in addition to the random encounter rate being maddeningly high, any attempt to escape from a fight instantly reduces your party’s defence stat to zero until they do. This means that if you even try to escape, an enemy can poke you with his thumb and your super-buff warrior guy will drop dead.

Luckily, the series was never this hard again. At its worst, Final Fantasy III is brutal and unforgiving on a level equal to Contra or Battletoads. What was with this generation of games and their stupidly hard difficulty levels anyway? It’s certainly one aspect of the series that I don’t miss.

The main problem with Final Fantasy III for me, anyway, is that it’s ultimately a very forgettable game. Despite the fact that I’ve completed it a few times before, none of the game really sticks out in my mind as being very memorable. I like to think this says more about the game than it does about me, but it very well could be a bit of both. All things considered, Final Fantasy III didn’t really bring that much to the series apart from the admittedly excellent Job System- none of the characters were particularly interesting, and none of the locations really stood out. Don’t get me wrong, this is a much better game than its predecessors, but the whole experience was just very forgettable.

I know this write-up isn’t very long, but I really don’t have all that much to say. Even though Final Fantasy III has a lot of flaws, it does so many other things right that the first two games didn’t that I can’t judge it too harshly. It may be frustratingly difficult and sometimes downright unfair, but I can’t help but like it much more than FF1 or FF2. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again though- I’m so glad the games were never as hard as this again though. In fact, they just get easier from here on out.

Oh well. Onward and upward.

So now Square had an issue- Final Fantasy had become the runaway hit nobody expected, and with the company back on its feet, they could begin developing games again.

“Hey!” Hironobu Sakaguchi (probably) exclaimed to his head designer, Akitoshi Kawazu one morning. “Final Fantasy was a hit! You know what that means? We need to make a sequel! Just think of it! We’ll make a bigger world, with more characters, more spells, more enemies! Those fuckers over at Enix won’t know what hit them! Ha-ha! Final Fantasy II will be the greatest RPG of our time! Tell your team and get to work! Don’t let me down!”

It seemed like it would work too. Except this particular morning, Kawazu had been hitting the bong pretty hard.

“Hey!” Kawazu (definitely) said to the FF2 team that same morning. “Alright guys, we’ve got to make Final Fantasy II. So here’s my plan- you know all that stuff people liked about the first Final Fantasy…?”

“Scrap it. We’re gonna change everything.“

And it just got worse from there.

As you can no doubt tell, that was definitely a real conversation that actually happened at the Square offices back in 1988. The specifics may have been lost in translation and the mists of time, but one thing remains true- they changed almost all of the key mechanics of the first game- and not for the better. More on that later.

So let’s get this straight. I don’t like this game, and I never have. Many years ago I completed the original NES version of Final Fantasy II (because… y’know. I’m a masochist) and vowed to never touch it again. So this time, like Final Fantasy I, I played through the PSP remake of Final Fantasy II to ease the pain.

It didn’t help that much.

Side note: I’ll also point out that the screenshot function of my PSP (which isn’t a very… er, legal function anyway) decided to stop working after playing this for about an hour- so many screenshots here are gonna be taken from Gamespot or whatever. I haven’t been able to get it working again, which means my playthrough of Final Fantasy III I just completed has no screenshots either. Bah. I’ll get it working as soon as I can.

Final Fantasy II tells the story of a group of youngsters whose home has been invaded by an ‘evil’ empire. Our heroes manage to escape their home town as it’s being raided, but their parents aren’t so lucky. The youngsters join up with a group of rebels and take part in a scheme to overthrow Emperor Palamecia and restore peace to the world.

So with that out of the way, all that’s left to do is take a look at the game, and what makes it such a wreck. Since Final Fantasy II was the first game in the series to have established characters as the player party, we’ll start there.

The Characters

Firion

Firion is the main character, and the hero of Final Fantasy II. There’s really not all that much to say about him either- he’s your typical RPG hero-type. After losing his adoptive parents when the Empire takes over his home town of Fynn, Firion manages to escape and joins the rebels- a group plotting to exact vengeance upon the Empire. See also: Luke Skywalker.

Guy

Guy is Firions best friend, and a borderline simpleton. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does have something to say, he seems pretty thick. I think he’s actually retarded. I don’t know. What I do know however is that this guy is best suited to be your party’s main attacker due to his crazy strength. He can also talk to beavers! Why? THE GAME DOESN’T TELL YOU.

Leon

Leon is another good friend of Firion, and he’s separated from the party literally about a minute into the game, and he doesn’t join again until near the end. You do run into him at other points during the game, except he is now The Emperors right-hand man, and Firion and company are all “WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS DARK KNIGHT HMM THAT VOICE IS FAMILIAR”. After the party kills the Emperor at the end, Leon tries to become emperor himself, but Emperor Palamecia is just too much of a hardass to allow it, so he comes back from Hell to stop him, and to forge the empire he’s always wanted. Badass.

Maria

Spell-flinger, Leons brother, potential love interest to Firion. Move along, nothing to see here.

There are many more heroes that join your party through the course of the game, but these four are the most important. There are many villains also, but let’s just look at the head honcho.

Emperor Mateus Palamecia

He’s the leader of an evil empire, with plans of world domination who eventually lets the power go to his head and blah blah blah. Nothing new. Not now anyway. Palamecia is arguably the first villain of this type in a JRPG, and seeing as almost every JRPG since has had a Palamecia of its own, I think it’s fair to say that Square succeeded in creating a decent villain. Look out for him in later games as Emperor Gestahl, President Shinra, Sorceress Edea, Queen Brahne, Maester Seymour, Vayne Solidor, etc. Palamecias character became a JRPG cliche, and I don’t think I can fault FF2 for that- like I said, for it’s time this was new stuff.

Also, he looks like David Bowie in Labyrinth. Just sayin’!

The game, and why it doesn’t work

The main problem with Final Fantasy II is simply the fact that it’s almost like the game doesn’t want you to beat it. Thanks to the inclusion of a new, bat-shit retarded leveling system, grinding for EXP no longer becomes an option if the game gets too tough. No sir, ‘leveling up’ in Final Fantasy II is an entirely different story to the usual JRPG grind-fests.

In Final Fantasy II, if you want your characters attributes to get better, then you have to use them. That’s it. It may sound good in theory, but if the developers had bothered to put more than an hour of playtesting in, they would have found (like I, and millions more have) that this new system simply doesn’t work.

For example, let’s say Firion has a lower HP stat than the rest of the party. How do you raise it? Well, to raise a HP stat, you’ll need that character to take damage. The enemy isn’t doing much damage, or won’t attack him? That’s cool- you can do it yourself. And more often than not, you’re going to find that this is the preferable option. The sheer stupidity of the fact that in this game, to grind, you seek out a random fight, ignore the enemies and then smash your own team members to make them stronger just boggles the mind. I cannot conceive of anybody at Square thinking this worked well in-game, even for a moment.

As I said, it seemed Kawazu was on the strong stuff.

And I’m bitching about the PSP remake! In the NES version, it was nearly unplayable it was so broken- to the point where I honestly think nobody playtested it before it shipped. It was that bad.

That’s just for HP though. If you want to increase a characters strength, magic, or similar attribute, you just need to use the Fight or Magic command a bunch of times, and when you finish the battle you MAY just receive an upgrade to that stat. Maybe. There’s no way of knowing if you will or not.

Magic spells also level up with use, meaning if you were to buy the Thunder spell at the start of the game, it would be a Lvl. 1 Thunder spell. To get it to Lvl. 2, you’ll need to cast it a bunch of times in battle. In the early stages of the game, this isn’t a massive problem, but later in the game when you get access to spells like Holy or Ultima, they start at Lvl. 1 as well, and you’ll need to use them literally hundreds of times each to get them to a level where they’ll actually be able to do decent damage at that stage in the game.

It’s ludicrous, it’s a waste of time, and worst of all, it isn’t fun. The game feels like a chore at best, and some kind of bizarre torture at worst.

That said however, Final Fantasy II introduced a hell of a lot of series mainstays, and for that, it gains some points. So let’s take a look at some of the things it brought to the series, apart from suffering.

Chocobos

Yes! Final Fantasy II was the game that introduced the world to the humble chocobo. For those who don’t know, chocobos are large, (usually) flightless birds which are used as steeds in the Final Fantasy universe. They first appeared here in FF2, and they’ve been in almost every subsequent game in the series. They’re awesome because when you’re riding one around the world map, you won’t be hassled by random monster encounters.

I always wondered what they taste like. Nobody ever talks about eating them in the games, which is strange because I reckon they’d be fucking delicious.

The Evil Empire

There is almost no other cliche that defines a JRPG quite as well as that of the evil, oppressive empire. It’s become almost a staple of the genre, that the main force opposing the heroes is an empire led by a cruel, power hungry leader. The evil empire as an enemy was almost certainly a cue taken from Star Wars (like a lot of other things in Final Fantasy II, I might add) but over the years it’s been an entity used in countless other RPGs from other developers, as well as in later Final Fantasy games such as VI, VIII and XII.

By the way, the man who leads such an empire is almost always a crazed, power hungry dictator with no regard for human life. If they aren’t, then they’re usually killed and usurped by someone that is. Kefka killed Emperor Gestahl in VI. Edea killed President Deling in VIII. Vayne killed Emperor Gramis in XII. See a pattern?

Cid

Final Fantasy II also introduced another series staple- and one that’s a little more odd. Since FF2, every main series FF game (and many spin-offs) have featured a character named Cid. For a franchies that doesn’t have a continuing storyline or world, this is a tad strange. It seems the guys at Square just chose a random name and decided to have one in every game. Cid is one of a few recurring names in the Final Fantasy series, along with Biggs, Wedge (Star Wars references!) and Gilgamesh.

Cid characters are usually very mechanically minded, usually appearing as engineers or inventors that aid the player party in some way. They’re also usually much older than the player characters, often acting as a father figure to the group- sometimes having a connection to one or more of the party members such as Cid Fabool in Final Fantasy IX or Cid Márquez in Final Fantasy VI.

Breakdown

Final Fantasy II, as far as I am concerned, is a terrible game. It fails on so many fundamental levels it’s a wonder it sold well enough to warrant Final Fantasy III. The gameplay consists of guiding Firion and co. on a wild goose chase around the world, and running into infuriatingly frequent random battles on the way. The battles aren’t fun- enemies are usually too hard and require *shudder* grinding to defeat- and as discussed, grinding in Final Fantasy II is an even more time consuming and boring process than in the first Final Fantasy.

While Final Fantasy II can’t live up to the grand, epic stories told in later entries in the series, you can definitely see that this is where it all started. Final Fantasy II was the first to have a proper story, with characters that spoke and had personalities of their own, and although it’s not that impressive these days, for its time Final Fantasy II was quite progressive with the way that it told a story, and it paved the way for future entries in the series.

Despite its numerous and atrocious shortcomings, and the fact that it’s in my opinion the weakest entry in the series, I find it hard to hate Final Fantasy II. When I consider the amount of things it introduced to the series and the influence it had on it, I’m willing to forgive it a little. That said, I really find this game hard to recommend to anyone.

I’m glad the series only gets better from here on out. Final Fantasy III, here I come.

Of the Final Fantasy series, the first title isn’t really one of my favourites. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to some of the later games in the series if you ask me.
My play through of Final Fantasy this past few days, my first in many years, truly hammered this home.

Final Fantasy has not aged well. This is a game that came out in 1987 and has undergone many face-lifts since then, but even with a new coat of paint and a refined combat engine, this is a game that is honestly very hard to recommend.

But let’s take a trip back to 1987, where a small game developer named Square is in the midst of a financial crisis. After a string of unsuccessful titles for the Nintendo Entertainment system, the company was looking bankruptcy square in the face, their director of planning, a man named Hironobu Sakaguchi, decided to put all the company’s money into the development of one last game- the game he always wanted to create, and since he thought it would be his final work in the industry, he named it Final Fantasy. Oh, the irony.

As I’ve said before, Final Fantasy is a game I always held very close to my heart. It was the game that introduced me to the genre so many years ago, and I had nothing but fond memories of this, the first game in a long and very enjoyable franchise.

Ah, how suddenly things can change.

I always suspected this would realise this, as is the way with ‘nostalgia goggles’, but this week I realised that Final Fantasy, in my humble opinion, is garbage. This isn’t because I’ve been comparing it to later games in the series, and this isn’t because I’m a pussy and can’t handle a challenging game- it’s because this game simply isn’t fun to play, and when one of the classics of the genre and in fact, the entire medium isn’t fun to play, well sir, you have a problem.

Enough about this though, let’s get into the game, shall we?

The Characters

Unlike almost every other entry in the series, Final Fantasy doesn’t have a set cast of player characters. Rather, you get four party members and you have to choose a class for each one.

The Warrior

The warrior is your basic melee-tank fighter. This guy can equip most of the equipment in the game and he can dish out damage like nobody’s business. Lucky for you, he can take it as well and later on he can even use White Magic. This guy is amazing, pretty much. You’re boned if you don’t have at least one in your party.

The Black Mage

The Black Mage is always hiding under his cloak, never allowing his (probably very ugly) face to be shown. As such, he’s become one of the many mascots of the franchise due to his memorable face (or lack thereof). The Black Mage specialises in nuking enemies with elemental spells and status effects, and casting Haste and Saber on the rest of the team. Curious that those two spells became White Magic and then Green Magic in later installments…

The White Mage

Is it a man or a woman? Not many people know for sure, and even fewer give a damn. The White Mage is an invaluable unit to have as she(!) can cast the invaluable Cure and Heal spells on the rest of your team, who will no doubt need it due to all the ass-kicking they’ll be doing.

The Red Mage

The jack of all trades: he can use swords, cast black magic, white magic, and he wears a fucking pimp hat. Hells yes. He can do everything, but he isn’t particularly good at any of it. If nothing else, he has the best dress sense of any of the Light Warriors.

The Thief

Sort of like the warrior, except he sucks. He can’t equip swords or armour, he has less health, he does less damage and he wears a bandana. Hmm. That said, later in the game he can equip most equipment a warrior can and can cast Black Magic. Eh.

The Monk

He can punch stuff and he can punch stuff rather hard. They do a fair bit of damage but can’t use any magic and can’t use heavy armour. Go with a warrior instead.

So that’s what you’ve got to play with. For this playthrough, I didn’t go with a regular party, but opted for three Warriors and a Red Mage because I’m fucking hardcore and that’s how I roll.

Behold, the Warriors of Light!

The Warriors were so named due to the fact that I always imagined the Warrior to be really thick. Red Mage is named so because of his hat. I IS CREATIV

The game opens with a quick scene, stating that the world has been plunged into darkness, the four elements of earth, wind, water and fire have been knocked out of order, and that a prophecy states that when such events occur, four Warriors of Light will appear to save the day. That’s what happens.

And that’s that. The game starts. But wait, who are these Light Warriors? Where did they come from? Why are they here? I realise this is a game from a time when videogame stories were things like “The princess has been kidnapped and you need to rescue her” and “Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?” But still, it would be nice to give these characters some sort of backstory or explanation other than “they’re here because the prophecy said so.” It just doesn’t cut it these days, and while that may be a little unfair to say, it’s completely true. The fact that Square-Enix didn’t bother to try and add any kind of backstory in the remake of Final Fantasy when they added so much other stuff shows that they’re either happy with its lack of story or simply don’t care. I’m leaning towards the latter.

It’s interesting, but not unexpected, that the more I played Final Fantasy this week the more I realised just how far the series has strayed from its roots. Compare the original game to the modern Final Fantasy XII or god-forbid one of the many spin-offs like Crystal Chronicles that now carry its name and you’ll find that they almost have no common features. It’s one of those changes that happened so gradually that it was hard to notice. How did the series go from one game about four youths saving the world from evil to another about… well, four youths saving the world. Okay, so that still hasn’t changed. The difference with the characters in Final Fantasy is that none of them have ridiculous spiky hair, ridiculously large breasts, personality disorders, or a penchant for wearing too many belts. These were simpler times- times I have recently found to be rather dull, and although many wouldn’t agree with me about that, I think we can all agree that the gradual change the series went through was one that simply had to happen, lest Square find themselves in a financial situation not unlike the one they were in back in the 80′s (and later in 2000, but more on that another time).

Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy does have a story- it’s just that it’s so lacking that it may as well not be there at all. Oh well, let’s start up the game and see what the first quest for the Light Warriors is…

Oh fuck you.

So I need to rescue the princess huh? Fine. I’ll just go kill Garland and bring her back.

The only notable thing Garland has going for him these days is he can brag that he was the first ever boss in a Final Fantasy game. I guess that must be a pretty decent conversation starter for Garland, because let’s face it, he hasn’t got much else going for him. He isn’t a deep or interesting character by any means, he just says some generic garbage before you cave his skull in to save the princess. He doesn’t have the charm or memorable quotes of a villain like Kefka or Kuja, and he was even made obsolete in Final Fantasy IX by an even better villain with the same name.

Final Fantasy, like many RPGs features turn-based combat. Each of your characters can make a move each turn, as can each enemy. A move could be attacking with their weapon, casting a spell, using an item, whatever. You likely already know this anyway, I’m just explaining for those who’ve never played. Basically, Final Fantasy is not an action game, and fights are supposed to require (at least a little) strategy with this system.

Of course my party is made up of tanks, so fuck that. I just hammer the X button until I’ve won the fight.

I bet I can think of something.

Too easy! This game is too easy. I bet I’ll have the whole thing knocked over by this afternoon! It’s starting to come back to me by this time- I’m beginning to remember everything I once knew about this game.

And that’s when things started to go bad.

I remembered the lack of a story, the need to grind to beat bosses, the fetch quests, the looooong treks through the many caves and ruins in the world. The backtracking. The limited inventory. The broken spells. Everything. Oh God, what have I done? I remembered why I have come to love the Final Fantasy series, and why this game doesn’t fit.

Anyway, the basic plot is that the Light Warriors have to visit the four shrines of the crystals, kill the Elemental Fiends that hang around them and then the world will be saved. That’s it. There isn’t any other story, there’s no character development, there are no cutscenes. The characters are there, but they are shells. They have no personality, not even any spoken lines. If you’re looking for characters like Terra, Cloud, Squall or Zidane then you’re fresh out of luck- none of the characters in this game come even close to displaying any kind of depth that would make them comparable to the half-breed, basket case, emo git, or alien clone protagonists you’ll find later in the series. The Light Warriors don’t even have default names for Pete’s sake- so from now on I’m making Chunk canon in the Final Fantasy universe. Just sayin’.

So it’s a Final Fantasy game with minimal story- so what do you spend the game doing? Well, apart from running around the world going on fetch-quests for everybody, you have to visit the four temples and kill the Elemental Fiend of each one. Seeing as the Four Fiends is a recurring feature of the series, let’s meet them, shall we?

Lich

The elemental fiend of earth, you’ll find him at the bottom of the imaginatively-titled Earth Cave. Lich is responsible for the decay of the earth, and the near destruction of the nearby agricultural town of Melmond. While Garland may be the first boss of the series, this guy is the first major boss, but is still pretty forgettable. Don’t take him lightly though, he can completely rape an under-leveled party.

Marilith

Marilith is the fiend of fire, found in the Gurgu Volcano. Her deal is pretty much that she wants to see the world burn, and oddly enough you’d think she’d be weak against ice spells, but for me fire damage seemed to work better. My sources tell me that her name and design are based off a Dungeons and Dragons monster. The more you know!

Kraken

The fiend of water, he kinda reminds me of somebody.

Bootstrap Bill, you're a liar and you will spend an eternity on this ship!

Tiamat

The final fiend you face is Tiamat, the master of wind. Look out for her again in Final Fantasy II, VIII, IX and XII. She’s a bitch.

Once you’ve wasted hours of your life killing the four fiends (many more hours if you’re playing the NES version), you’re ready for the final part of the game. Fantastic! Let’s head back to the Chaos Shrine and finish this game off. Upon entering, you discover a strange portal in the room where you first fought Garland, leading to 2000 years in the past. Why is it here? You don’t know? Why do the heroes venture through it? Just because.

It’s here that they learn that the four fiends sent Garland 2000 years into the past, so that he could send the fiends 2000 years into the future to wreak havoc- creating a confusing time-loop.

Snake? Snaaaaake!

Garland explains this all to you, before turning into a hellish demon named Chaos. I think I feel a final boss coming on!

Chaos was the first boss in the game that I had to *shudder* grind to beat. This fucker is hard.  When he isn’t pounding on your party one by one with brutal physical attacks, he’s wearing the whole team down with special elemental attacks that damage your entire party. The amount of times Pimp Hat died before I managed to bring this fucker down was crazy. But if you keep at it, slowly chipping away at Chaos’ HP, you’ll eventually come out on top.

Man, I hope the ending sequence clears up all the lose ends of the story! All that crazy time travel shit really needs clarifying! I’m sure it will all be made cle-

Fuck you, game.

As I briefly mentioned before, I think what is most interesting to note about Final Fantasy in retrospect is just how little it has in common to the series as it exists today. So much of what makes Final Fantasy, well, Final Fantasy, isn’t here. If you’re looking for a game with Buster Swords, giant summoned monsters, moogles, chocobos, bombs, tonberries, and all of the other things that define Final Fantasy, well son- you’d best look some place else. None of that can be found here- and why would it be? After all, Final Fantasy was never meant to be a hit, and its development didn’t require the creation of a bunch of quirky side characters and innovative gameplay features. This game was only intended to ever be one thing: a cash-in, a Dragon Quest clone to help Square get back on its feet.

And that’s exactly what it did.

Final Fantasy was never meant to be a runaway hit, and yet despite all of Squares expectations, that’s exactly what it turned out to be. Sure it was a clone of a rival companies game, but it became a rare exception of a clone done correctly. Final Fantasy was a better game than Enix’s Dragon Quest in almost every way- a bigger world, more characters, more spells, a more interesting combat system- it was all there. It’s funny to think it was coded and designed in less than a year by a team of about seven people. In contrast, the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII has been in development for almost six years and its development crew is into the hundreds. Consider that for a moment.

So what do I think of this game now I’ve played through it again after so long? I hate it. Seriously, despite the fact I was playing an easier, more forgiving version of the game I initially loved, I still had very little fun with Final Fantasy. It’s tiring, it’s annoying, it’s boring, it’s tedious- but it’s done. In all honesty, I can’t see myself playing through this game ever again.

Hey, I kinda feel like I’ve said that about another game before… but I just can’t remember what it was…

Oh.

]]> http://jacobbles.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/final-fantasy/feed/ 6 jacobbles ff1 Fighter BlackMage WhiteMage RedMage Thief monk frmbuf030 (2) frmbuf040 frmbuf044 frmbuf046 frmbuf048 frmbuf049 frmbuf092 frmbuf102 frmbuf136 frmbuf136 copy frmbuf149 frmbuf188 frmbuf202 frmbuf012 http://jacobbles.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/the-terrible-twos/ http://jacobbles.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/the-terrible-twos/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:21:22 +0000 jacobbles http://jacobbles.wordpress.com/?p=450 ]]>

Oh Jesus, what have I done? I’m not looking forward to starting this, but I shall be doing so tonight. Hopefully it’s a lot less brutal than the NES version was.

Stay tuned for a write-up of Final Fantasy I coming very soon.

So before I get too far into this, I’d like to state something for the record.

I think very highly of this game.

Final Fantasy I was always a game I held in high regard. When I was younger, I played it at a friends house an awful lot and I fell in love with it. As the years went by, I moved on to other titles in the series and enjoyed them as well. When I became aware of the existence of PC-based NES emulators, Final Fantasy was one of the first games I played. I would have been about 12 or 13 at this time, and it was tough as nails, but I saw the game through to the end and it felt damn good. I have no idea how I managed to do that. I bring this up because I get the feeling that after playing it again after so many years, my view of it is going to be much, much different.

For the purpose of writing this piece, I was fully intending to play through the NES version of Final Fantasy all over again. But it occurred to me- with all the remakes of it out there, why don’t I try one of those instead? After all, Final Fantasy has been ported and remade more times than I care to count, so why should I have to bother with the horrid NES version all over again? It’s not much of a retrospective if I’m not playing the originals right?

Well yeah, that’s right. But there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t play one of the remakes instead. After all, the story is the same. The characters and the dialogue and the gameplay are all the same- all that’s really been updated is the graphics, the music and the user interface. Sure, the enemies have been tweaked to be not quite so difficult, but I hardly think the difficulty was what made Final Fantasy the defining game of it’s genre back in 1987. For all intents and purposes, the contents of this piece would be more or less the same whether I was playing the NES version from 1987 or the PSP version from 2007.

You want to hear what I have to say about graphics? The graphics don’t phase me, not even a little. If the NES version played as smoothly and as easily as the PSP version did but still looked like the NES version, I wouldn’t give a shit. It’s the same game. The graphics in the NES version may look atrocious in comparison to the gorgeous sprites you’ll see in the PSP version, but it doesn’t matter. I could swing either way. The graphics are just a means to an end anyway, that end being accomplishing the quest the game sets out for you- a quest that has not changed in twenty years and countless remakes.

And that’s why I’m going to be playing the PSP versions of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II. Sue me.

Tonight, I start the first game of the series- the original Final Fantasy.

All of these games will be their original incarnations, with translation patches where necessary (Final Fantasy III, V) and all of them up until Final Fantasy X will be emulated on my PSP. As I-IX will be on my PSP, this means I can take screenshots and easily manage all my stuff from one console. The problem I’m going to encounter when I get to X and XII on the PS2 is that I have no way of taking screenshots of those. Hmm.

Also I neglected to mention that I won’t be playing Final Fantasy XI because as some of you might not know, it is a MMORPG- and allegedly not even a very good one. I’m not getting myself mixed up into that.

So yeah, it’s really gonna be eleven Final Fantasy games. Maybe I’ll play some of the spin-offs if I’m not completely burnt out after Final Fantasy XII.

But anyway…

Let’s get this over with.

This is a thing that is happening.

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, and now is the time. Final Fantasy XIII has a confirmed Australian release date of March 2010, and in preparation, I have decided to play through the initial twelve entries of the series in order, and then write a little bit about each one. I think it will be interesting to see what I think of some of them now I’m an older, more snobby jaded experienced gamer. Some of these games I haven’t played in a long time and have rather fond memories of- I have a feeling I won’t be so warm towards them this time.

So here’s the thing- since some of the earlier games in the series have been remade and ported to every console under the sun, should I play the remakes or endure the originals? Believe me, playing the NES version of Final Fantasy II once is enough for one lifetime, if I have to do it again I think I might just kill myself. For the first two games for instance, I was thinking of playing the PSP remakes as they have the added advantages of being all around better- also I have the advantage of being able to take screenshots which would be great for using in a write-up about the games.

People who have played Final Fantasy games, what do you think?

Everything’s a novelty…
Everyone grows but me…

:::Rant ahead:::

Waiting for Between the Buried and Me’s The Great Misdirect to be released this last few months has been the only time in my life I’ve ever actually been counting days until a records release. The effect that their last album left on me was far greater than it probably should have been- but so different and new was the kind of music to me that I couldn’t help but fall instantly in love with it. Colours is an album I still listen to on a very regular basis, and I’m yet to grow tired of it- it holds so many memories of happier times- the first time I listened to White Walls in September of 2007 I was on the bus to town to meet up with Kara, a little over two months into our relationship. Although those carefree times have long since passed and been replaced with more complicated, dull, tedious stages of my life, one would think that listening to White Walls nowadays would only serve to make me feel miserable about my life today (not that there’s really anything to be miserable about). On the contrary, listening to it has the opposite effect- the final seven minutes of White Walls remains some of my favourite music ever, and listening to it makes me realise how much things have changed in those two years- for better and for worse.

I guess what I’m trying to get across is that Colours is an album I hold very dear, for more reasons than one. While many were quick to call it an oddly-paced mess of genres, for me it was a very different and welcome musical experience, and one I won’t soon forget.

Slide into the water,
become one with the sea.
Life seems so much smaller,
swim to the moon.

Naturally when I heard earlier this year that Between the Buried and Me were working on a follow-up titled The Great Misdirect, I was excited. I was unsure whether it would be better than Colours- but I didn’t really care. Anything that continued in the musical direction that Colours went in was fine by me. A few weeks ago, I woke up one Thursday morning before Tafe and checked up on my RSS feeds on my iPhone (inb4 smart-ass comments from Jess) and found the album had been leaked. My internet had never seemed slower than when I was downloading The Great Misdirect that morning- probably because I needed to catch a bus in 6 minutes and the download was scheduled to take 9.

Eh, it’s only music, I’ll download it later a bus, I’ll catch the next one. The day was going to hold a lot of aimless wandering for me, so I’d rather have some new music to do it with. I lovingly ignored John on the bus ride to the city that morning and instead cranked the volume on my iPhone and listened to The Great Misdirect. So is it better than Colours?

In a nutshell: no.

That isn’t to say it’s bad though- it’s actually a fantastic album- a lot of the better elements of Colours were revisited and expanded upon, and a few of the tracks are amazing (Fossil Genera, Swim to the Moon), but I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I haven’t listened to it a hundred times yet, but it just doesn’t seem to have that certain something that made Colours so special to me. I can’t really describe it. I’d say I’m disappointed, but that would only be half true. It’s no Colours, but it’s an amazing album nonetheless. It shifts moods and genres in a similar way Colours, but it all seems so much more coherent and natural. The shift from honky-tonk piano to heavy guitar and double bass riffs and then down to gentle acoustics feels so damn natural- which is impressive given the usual kind of music the band plays. The last few minutes of Fossil Genera- A Feed From Cloud Mountain I think might be some of the best music the band has yet produced and yet it’s so radically different from their usual kind of music. The ending of the song builds up and winds down in a very similar manner to White Walls did and would have made a much stronger final track than Swim to the Moon was- which was fantastic, but it ended far too suddenly.

Here, we’re awake in the Desert of Song,
Silence broken, here we’re awake and the
silence is broken, silence is broken.

So what am I trying to get across with this stupid disjointed rant? Nothing. Shut your mouth. The Great Misdirect is an amazing album, but in my humble opinion, not as good as Colours. That’s it. I don’t feel like writing any more. If you read this, then kudos to you!

I wanna be your love,
I wanna make you cry,
and sweep you off your feet.

I wanna hurt your pride,
I wanna slap your face,
I wanna paint your nails.

I wanna make you scream,
I wanna braid your hair,
I wanna kiss your friends.

I wanna make you laugh,
I wanna dress the same,
I wanna defend you.

I wanna squeeze your thighs,
I wanna kiss your eyelids,
and corrupt your dreams.

I wanna crash your car,
I wanna scratch your cheeks,
I wanna make you sick.

I wanna sell you out,
want to expose your flaws.
I wanna steal your things.

I wanna show you off,
I wanna tell you lies,
I wanna write you books.

I wanna turn you on,
I wanna make you come
two-hundred times a day.

I wanna dry your tears,
every time you’re sad,
I wanna be your ‘what’s happening’.
I wanna be your only friend.

I only go all the way.

This time I’m not pretending I can’t take the trash
Your trashy friends are spreading about us.
They got like fifty personalities- Oh girl, that’s so messed up.
You see that sculpture on the hill, that’s where she queered me out.

Forever.
They’re monitoring my self conscious massacres, I know
Bringing it closer to the surface so it’s easily pervertable.

I want to be a beast,
I want to make you proud,
and play with your head.

I want to take you out,
make you feel adored,
and buy you everything.

I want to hurt you bad,
make you paranoid,
and say the sweetest things.

I want to help you grow,
and for eternity
I want to be your ‘what’s happening’

So what’s happening?

Thanks John!