Integrity

ok now i'm interested in granblue fantasy i think if you (literally you, but also the general 'you') are interested in seeing what classic final fantasy is all about, the best places to start (for the pixel remasters) are probably ff1 or ff5. ff1's breezy and easy to get into and ff5 is the best overall encompassing of Classic-Style Final Fantasy, hitting a sweet spot between having an actual narrative and characters and having a good amount of party customization

FINAL FANTASY V (SQUARE, 1992) Finished: 6/3/23. Playtime: 35.8 hours. Where do you go after Final Fantasy 4? You don't. You go back to Final Fantasy 3, and you make the game that, bluntly, that game was supposed to be. I've long cited Final Fantasy 5 as one of my favorites in the series (I know! Despite ATB!) and I'm thrilled to say that, while it's not a perfect game by any means, it absolutely holds up to my memory... or lack thereof. I've been lying to some of you for years, and some of you for nearly an entire month. I don't think I actually ever finished Final Fantasy 5 Advance. I recognized many things (generally not details) from the first two-thirds of the game, and then everything hit me like it was new. Talking to mates, I'm pretty sure it's because it was. To the best of my reckoning, I think I made it to the Merged World, put the game down for a particularly hellish exam week, and then simply never picked the game back up again for no reason. Happens. Anyhow, Final Fantasy 5 marks a return to the two core tenets of 3: a breezier, lighter story; and swappable jobs for your mans. There's not terribly much to say about the story of 5, and when you read the discourse about it you pretty rarely see anyone even mention it and literally nobody talk about any NPC from the game besides Exdeath occasionally and, of course, Gilgamesh all the fucking time. There's reasons for all of that. The central characters are charming enough to be memorable but not enough to really be talked about, the plot has its slump periods where it takes too long (particularly in the early second and middle third worlds) and doesn't say too much more than 3's plot with far more words, and Gilgamesh is just as great as his reputation/my memory suggested. As with every film, it could have stood to be about 15% shorter, but the final product is by no means either a flop or a masterpiece. It's solid enough for the gameplay to stand on and pretty much nothing more. The job system is, as with 3, where the meat of the game's at, and it comes with a very simple and important change: cross-pollination. All except the two endgame jobs have a free slot that can hold any command or passive ability that character has unlocked from any other job. This single, simple addition to the system changes everything. Combinations of abilities from different classes that you feel clever for thinking up suddenly become possible to wrangle, including some truly busted ones. Getting a pool of abilities going for each of your heroes builds a little bit of role-inertia that 3 lacked - you can pivot your squad on a dime, but your bruiser is always going to have the edge at bruising, and your wizard is always going to have the edge at wizarding. Master a job, gain its abilities, and move on to another. Your squad is constantly in a state of flux as you go grab new toys to build a toolbox out of. Combat becomes the proving ground for the ideas that you had in between combats, which is the ideal state for any RPG-adjacent game to be in. It is such a genuinely fucking fantastic system that it's insane that the designers at Square built it at, essentially, the second time of asking. This even trickles into endgame funneling you into jobs like how 3 did, but in a much more interesting way. Every job has four actions available at all times: Attack, Item, the class's default command ability (e.g. Black Magic or Guard), and the free slot. Freelancer is your Onion Knight-like job that your guys start off in and that you shuffle out of as soon as possible, but it has two unique properties. First, that it doesn't have a default command ability, meaning you are free to equip two abilities from your entire unlocked pool instead of one. Second, that all unlocked passive abilities are automatically equipped for free, and every Mastered job contributes a relevant bonus to stats to the Freelancer. If you've mastered all the mage classes on one guy, that guy will be an incredible wizard as a Freelancer. If you've mastered everything, the Freelancer is a do-anything god. The 22nd and secret job, the Mime, takes this even further - the Mime's only intrinsic ability is Mimic, and you can fill those three extra slots with whatever command or passive abilities your heart could possibly desire, including (or discluding!) Attack and Item. While there's convergence into Freelancer and Mime in the very long run, the path you take to the endgame is going to shape what everyone's individual Freelancers and Mimes will look like to a massive degree. It's, again, a bafflingly intelligently-made system. Heh. Intelligent system. It's not all roses, but the non-roses are largely nits to pick. Each job only gets its passives, not command abilities, for free. This is a nothing burger for, like, the wizards, but becomes a huge issue with already-struggling jobs like Beastmaster, which is actually incapable of having all Beastmaster abilities ready to go at the same time. The good news is that this mostly affects the weirder, niche, dare I say crappier jobs; the bad news is that this does hamper variety to no small degree, particularly in the midgame. The second issue, relatedly, is that there were some pretty questionable job balancing decisions, such as Chemist being a whole item-based job that's mastered in no time flat and basically only exists so that one guy can pick up Mix for the two fights it's really good for and use it on another job. Still, if the worst I can say about the system is that "it's not greatly balanced", it's further evidence that it's a pretty damn good system. The only time it sort-of doesn't feel great to interact with is when you want something like Mix or Steal from a job you have no intention of using even in the medium term, and you have to pick a sacrificial hero to gimp for like a half an hour to get it. That's the worst it gets. Speaking of the worst, let's call back to ATB. Final Fantasy 5 made two incredibly obvious moves and one incredibly cunning move that, all combined, make the game far more palatable to simply play compared to its predecessor. The obvious ones are obvious as hell: spells no longer have charge timers after choosing to cast, making wizards not feel like complete dogshit to use; and the pace of combat (enemies in particular) is slowed down a noticeable amount, making mistakes in action selection far less punishing. The cunning one is one that only hit me long after starting Final Fantasy 5: you only control four guys, instead of five. That doesn't sound like too big a deal, but there's a significant mental load trickling-down that occurs when that's combined with the job system. Rather than wrapping my head around playing Cecil, Porom, Palom, Tellah, and Yang, I'm only playing four guys and I'm choosing how they play, which reduces my cognitive load when someone comes up - I know I only want one wizard, and Lenna is a complete unga-bunga smash-yer-face-in fighter, so I can ignore her turn, etc. I can build the sustainable force that I like to play, rather than making the toolkit forced upon me work. Combined with the slower enemy reaction time, I'm taking fewer actions, making fewer mistakes per action, and being punished less severely for those mistakes. It's a subtle improvement, and the game would be far better served with a good turnbased system like 10's, but as far as ATB goes it isn't an active detriment anymore. I'm still a hater, but I didn't expect to be conceding any ground to it so quickly, and here I am. I can more easily see Mr. Ito's vision for it as a bridge between turn-based and real-time combat now. And so we come to the achievements. These games are getting bigger, and 5 does not buck the trend. It's got all the vices of 4's achievement list - missable enemies, missable treasures, one-time location visits, rare encounters, the works. To be fair on one account, the game doesn't have anything nearly as rare as the summon/pink tail rarities at the end of 4, but all the others are very comparable. On top of that, 5 adds a few fun achievements, like finding the secret job class and finding the eight pianos all over the world to cement Bartz as a Piano Maestro. There's another level grind one at the end; this one's 50 and I beat the game at 41, so it was a cinch to mop up with x4 experience built into the game. There's one for mastering all jobs, which means mastering all jobs on one character, because one of the jobs is Freelancer, and Freelancer is mastered by mastering all 21 other jobs rather than leveling up itself. Bartz had five jobs mastered when I beat Exdeath, and this one took a few hours of grinding at x4 ability points to mop up. Finally, we've got a fun and an unfun achievement each that 5 brings to the table that will probably be coming back later. One is to learn all of the newly-minted Blue Magic. Blue Mages, a series staple, learn enemy abilities typically by being subjected to them. This isn't missable, but there's no hints as to where the spells are as far as I'm aware, and some of them are locked behind using a Beastmaster's Control ability to force an enemy to cast them, or are spells on enemies who don't have enough MP natively to cast them without being fed an ether. It's a fun idea, but raw as hell, and later entries would do it much better. The other is, regrettably, postgame superbosses. We're there now. Omega is doable en route to Exdeath, but Shinryu is meant to wipe out even a party who can make it to Exdeath without a contest. Honestly, with The Strat (TM) (a Mime with Time Magic and Mix), Shinryu went down with only a little bit of work after all of my grinding, so it wasn't that bad overall. Still, this is notable as it marks the beginning of what's going to become the superbosses of Spira and Ivalice later, which I'm not at all looking forward to tackling. Burn that bridge when we get to it, though! Sayonara, Final Fantasy 5. You were genuinely fantastic.

genuine lol at this. incredible

x-2 does the "most" with ATB because it's all flash and very little substance. x-2's a notably easy game to memory, and being atb instead of turnbased just means it's all glitz and glamor and i think that's fine overall. nobody has ever actually made productive, deliberate use of chain attacks, and x-2 never demands it. still galls me that ffx's turnbased system exists only in the game, it's genuinely perfect for trad jrpg combat. annoying! E: there wasn't really anywhere to put this in the 4 post but i also want to note that hiroyuki ito was the mind behind the classic final fantasy dudes lined up across from dudes battle window, and he got the idea from one of his favorite pastimes, watching the NFL. your party and the monsters are meant to mimic the offensive and defensive linesmen lined up across the line of scrimmage. the way actions worked in ff1-3 was meant to mimic a coach calling plays rather than four individuals deciding what to do. he'd visit the well of gridiron again for ff12, where he designed gambits (the rule-based party member automation system in, precisely, dragon age origins and final fantasy 12 and bafflingly no other games) as a representation of a playbook that you write down yourself. hiroyuki ito kicks ass lmao

FINAL FANTASY IV (SQUARE, 1991) Finished: 26/2/24. Playtime: 23.3 hours. Final Fantasy 4 for the DS is a bad game. I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I meant it very sincerely. What I never really took the time to inspect, though, was why I thought Final Fantasy 4 for the DS to be a bad game. I played it during a fairly uncritically-consumptive phase of my gaming history, years before I started to think more deeply about things. There was something in there about Augments and increased difficulty and something something, but it all really just boiled down to I didn't enjoy it. I played all the way to the final dungeon, restarted, and beat the game on the second time of asking. The consistent line I'd been told was that Final Fantasy 4 for the DS, being made by the same people who made Final Fantasy 3 for the DS, was just an exceptionally bad port of an otherwise-good (or even, some used to say back in the day, the best) Final Fantasy. I was looking forward to the Pixel Remaster for this reason - in some ways, it's finally slaying a demon. Could it answer what I didn't like about Final Fantasy 4 for the DS? Could it assign blame to that port, show me the framework underlying and how it was tortured into a bad game, the way Final Fantasy 3's Pixel Remaster did? Well, I got an answer, and it's a simple one: Final Fantasy 4 is a bad game. To dig into this, let's talk versions. Final Fantasy 4 has been ported a lot, and nobody agrees on how the game really ought to play. The original version, Final Fantasy IV for the Super Famicom, will hereafter be "the baseline" for difficulty and features. Final Fantasy II for the SNES and Final Fantasy IV Easy Type for the Super Famicom would both come out later that year, both decreasing the difficulty from the baseline to various degrees. There's a popular myth that Easy Type was ported back to Japan and based on the American release (some will say it was called "American Version" because we stupid gaijin are bad at vidya), but the opposite is actually true - the American release inherited some changes from Easy Type in addition to a whole host of its own changes. Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Playstation would mark a slightly tweaked international release of the baseline, and Final Fantasy 4 DS took the baseline and made it a lot harder, including several new features (like Augments) among the hefty rebalance. The WonderSwan was a Japan-only competitor to the good old Game Boy, with its own Color variant coming out around the turn of the millennium before the project was squashed with complete ruthlessness by the titanic Game Boy Advance. Final Fantasy 4 had a port for the WonderSwan Color, which was based off of Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Playstation and had a few further tweaks to the difficulty. Following that, Final Fantasy 4 Advance was based off of the WonderSwan Color port, including many of its bugs and idiosyncrasies and increasing the difficulty slightly overall. Final Fantasy 4 Pixel Remaster, finally, is based off of the Advance port, with most of the bugs fixed and with the difficulty further tuned up. There's the lineage of this game. Now to actually talk about my experiences with the game! I didn't like it. The stone on the game's neck is absolutely Active Time Battle. ATB was a system cooked up by an insane person (Hiroyuki Ito kicks fuckin' ass) as a bridge between the turnbased games of the day and his envisioned future of all-real-time JRPG combat. Mr. Ito knew that he wanted to go from Final Fantasy 3 to Dragon's Dogma, but he thought that this kind of transition would be hard to pull off on contemporary hardware and risked alienating gamers of the era, which I get the logic behind. ATB would be a familiar-feeling turn-based-adjacent battle system, but which required some promptness in inputting commands lest you lose action economy to your own indecision. It's a sound idea, and the vision behind it is telling when it comes up that Mr. Ito would go on to invent Final Fantasy 12's absolutely batshit (yet tremendously aesthetic) battle system. The problem with the idea is that it actually sucks tremendously, and similar to Real-Time With Pause (which was invented for similar reasons), it ends up accomplishing nothing of its own compared to either a strict turn-based or an actual real-time alternative. Timers are always running, putting a pressure on you that (in most Final Fantasies) ends up feeling more impactful than it actually is. Actors still act individually, and the ATB timers are paused when any kind of animation is playing out. You can tick an option to pause the timers when you're targeting or in a sub-menu, at least, but any time you're selecting actions or processing who you've taken control of because two timers completed next to each other, you're dropping some amount of action economy to the enemy. To oversimplify a little bit, a little cost/benefit analysis. The primary benefit of a strict turn-based system is that the player is offered significant or infinite time to consider their moves, which hypothetically leads to more creative problem solving or at least more agency over choosing to problem solve less creatively. The typical downside to a strict turn-based system is that thing tend to play out slower, too slowly for many peoples' tastes, or perhaps it's better stated that they're relatively wooden and un-flashy. One can flip these on their heads pretty directly for a proper real-time system: the primary benefit is that things resolve more quickly and require more mastery for the player to keep a handle on, while the primary downside is typically that exercising a more creative solution is significantly harder than a turn-based equivalent, where mechanical skill is far less of a factor. I think this is a generally accurate and fairly uncontroversial summary of the overall reasons behind each, without getting too into the weeds of any specific implementation of either. ATB, taken as a system itself and isolated as best as one can from the games it inhabits, occupies a space where it represents the downsides of both real-time and of turn-based combat. Because the timer is always ticking and actions are assigned on the button press, as opposed to the playcalling form of 1 through 3, there's no take-backsies and the game makes you feel as though there's no real room to think. You're constantly playing whackamole with your little football men, and a deviation from your plan that you didn't concoct between actions or during a pause and enact perfectly will be met with a free smack in the face from someone you're fighting. Creative problemsolving is tremendously disincentivized as compared to good old Route One smashing. I set up the Autobattle Engine in 1 through 3 because I find it satisfying to do so; I set up the Autobattle Engine in 4 because doing so would actually gain me significant action economy as compared to manually inputting commands against the enemy. However, despite not allowing breathing space to concoct and enact a clever strategy, the pace of battles is actually slower on average than if you were inputting commands with the same level of precision in the Famicom game ports, since animations still have to play and all action freezes while they're so doing. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect input immediately every time a character comes up, or autobattle if one prefers, ATB is only capable of playing as fast as an equivalent turn-based system except with mandatory downtime baked in for when nobody's turn is up yet. It's a system that is utterly without its own merit. While it feels more frenetic, and requires far more regular button pressing to accomplish the same things, the actual battles take longer. It's faster, without the benefit of being faster, and in the pursuit of making it faster it's also become less tactically intriguing rather than moreso. This has been all without getting into Final Fantasy 4's peculiarities of implementation. I'm not going to go into tremendous detail, but due probably to the game's wildly rotating cast, enemies and player units have their action timers scaled to how fast/slow they are relative to Cecil, Lord Protagonist. What this means, practically, is that there isn't really a "fast" or a "slow", just a faster or slower than Cecil by varying degrees. This has implications all over the game, but rears its ugly head in two particular points. For a fair chunk of the game, Cecil is your fastest party member. Enemies are scaled to him as well, and this combines to mean that for this whole section of the game, enemies feel sped up and your guys all feel glacial - because they are. The second time this creeps up is in the final boss fight. Due to the calculations, there are values of speed for Cecil where the final boss can act slower than any of your characters act, and values of speed for Cecil where the final boss can get two actions per action you take, causing party wipes without issue or even a real way to respond. None of this is explained in-game, and it's poorly documented online, so you're just kind of left wondering why enemies are suddenly so absurdly fast compared to you. That wildly rotating cast that I mentioned a moment ago also keeps Final Fantasy 4 from ever finding anything like a stride until it's far too late. In Final Fantasy 2, your rotating fourth guy was basically just an afterthought, and bore no real impact on how you played. In Final Fantasy 4, you can be left completely devoid of reliable wizardry or with nobody but Cecil as a frontliner for significant chunks of game. You're always adapting to new challenges, which can be a good thing, but the way Final Fantasy 4 goes about it it feels more like constantly working with fundamental holes in your toolkit as compared to something like 6, where (to memory) it felt more like using new tools to solve familiar problems. It's a bad look, and I can't say as I ever enjoyed the game on large account of it. Anyway, that's a lot of words about the fundaments of Final Fantasy 4 and why I think they're rotten. The rest of the game, unfortunately, doesn't sit much above the combat. There's about a whole guy and a half I actually like in 4's entire cast, maybe roundable to a complete two. The plot is a Saturday morning cartoon, but without the complete breeziness. It needed to be more serious and coherent, like 6's, or not to be taken seriously, like 3's. In a roundabout metaphor for ATB itself, it occupies a liminal space where it takes the wrong lessons from both aesthetics. The dungeon design absolutely does not descend to 2's pits, but the locations end up really samey in a way that the previous games didn't flop at, with about five distinct Dungeon Vibes for about fourteen dungeons. I'm no hand at all at music critique, but the bangers of 3's soundtrack have been replaced by much more generic guff, with a particular shoutout to the Dungeon Theme which sucks the majorest of ass and plays constantly. Woo woo woo WOO WOO WOO woo woo woo woo.... Final Fantasy 4 is the first of this set to have postgame grinds to do, and great news they've been nerfed heavily from what you may have heard. In brief, you have to grind out all of Rydia's optional summon magic as well as the Pink Tail from an encounter in one room in the final dungeon. These five drops used to constitute, by estimates I've seen, thirty to fifty hours of grinding on their own, up to tripling how long the game took from finish to 100%. As it stood, I farmed the lot of them in about two total hours. The previous games' achievements are all there, too - beat the game, fill out the bestiary (with missable entries), get all chests and hidden items (same), and travel everywhere and do every sidequest (same). Last up for me was actually getting everyone to level 70; I beat the game with Cecil at 62 and the rest of the party between 57 and 61. Even after turning on the Pixel Remaster's 4x XP boost as soon as I got to the postgame, Rydia was still lagging back at 67 after everything else was completed, and a single run back through the Lunar Subterrane polished everything off. There goes Final Fantasy 4, a game I sure have played twice now for some reason.

i finally picked up helldivers 2 to play with mates and it's like somebody took planetside and earth defense force but asked the brave question: what if we made them fun game fucking rules

DAVE THE DIVER (MINTROCKET, 2023) Finished: 20/2/24. Playtime: 35.3 hours. When it rains, it pours. It's always funny when multiple weeks-long projects converge by accident with a shorter one to produce more posts in a week than some entire months get, isn't it? Dave the Diver is the absolute poster child for scattergun game design. Complete kitchen sink bullshit. Concocted as "a game to represent the essence of fun" by Korean titan Nexon's fresh subsidiary Mintrocket, I'm modestly positive that the developers of Dave the Diver simply took every idea that they thought was good and did their best to make a cohesive product out of all of them. A less-corporate-feeling Resident Evil 6, if one will. Unlike Resident Evil 6, though, it largely comes together well. Your gameplay loops chiefly between a 2D swimming game with a harpoon gun (and, later, other options) to catch fish as you go deep into the ocean, and a Cook, Serve, Delicious! lite serving simulator each night to make money to fund the diving. It's a simple loop, but it absolutely works, and I'm known to be a sucker for anything that can be vaguely compared to the core loop of Recettear. There's not nearly as much variety in the swimming or serving as the game seems to purport early on, but there's just enough to get through the game's story without the tedium setting in. The tedium is, unfortunately, far more a matter of when than if, but you're still getting an easy 20-25 hours out of it by my reckoning. Dave the Diver attempts to spice things up by minigamizing everything. I mean fucking everything. There's three different minigames to serve three different kinds of drinks during the food rush, in addition to grinding wasabi for your head chef. You unlock, hell, four or five different tools to accomplish one- or two-time minigames while exploring the ocean, which are then discarded. There's about two and a half stealth sequences, but nothing at all like that in normal gameplay. There's a casino that you get access to halfway through the story with its own entire set of games. You control other guys a few times. You participate in cooking challenges that drop you completely cold into a Cooking Mama-style food preparation game. I'm not even touching on the phone games (including a complete set of Tamagotchi to collect and raise) or all the different side-objectives you get while diving or any of the actual restaurant management stuff - because not only do you get to manage your restaurant, you also get a second restaurant that's managed exclusively by people you appoint and you have to send them ingredients and personnel to function, and you get three different types of farm to manage as much or as little as you want to on top of those. There's even a free DLC tie-in with Dredge that involves, as you would expect, a complete recreation of the sailing and dredging mechanics from that game and animated renditions of a handful of the aberrations. While all of it is ultimately shallow content, the game equivalent of Val Kilmer's Top Secret!, the sheer unbridled breadth of it all is a little bit staggering. I think a big part of it comes back to a comment I made about The Great War, and many other times besides. Dave the Diver has all the elements of a hundred-hour roguelite fishing experience to it, and I could see someone being taken by those and thinking it's something it's not, but in the end it's a 25 hour game for 20 dollars. It's not a deep game, it's not a forever game, and it never really pretends to be. It's a game that I wholeheartedly recommend pretty much anyone look into, and you'll know within the first hour if you're going to enjoy the game or not. The game doesn't terribly outstay its welcome if you go for 100% achievements, but it does gently outstay it. A game day is divided into three time periods: morning and afternoon are strictly for diving, and last One Dive no matter how long or short that takes. Evening is initially for One Shift at the restaurant, but later you gain the ability to do a nighttime dive (or, occasionally, a Dredging) at the cost of one third of your restaurant hours before you do the One Shift. I saw the game's story through in 43ish days, began to feel the fatigue setting in around 52 days, and finished the achievements on Day 60 exactly. The last three or four days were just wheel-spinning, completely out of achievement-related things to really work on besides passing the time. Completion essentially just relates to playing the game a lot. Get Bancho Sushi to the top rank, see all except one of the sidestories through to their conclusions, take most of the pictures, discover all of the guns, upgrade your farms all the way, and such. Only one thing is missable, and that's during the Metal Gear Solid parody level (which is there, for some reason!) you can eat some food off the ground. Most people get this by accident - it's pretty in your way - but if you miss it, you'll need a whole new file to get back there. Everything else just comes as you go, keeping going into the postgame after beating the story to get more fish and wring all the blood out of the stone. My last two achievements were to evolve five different Tamagotchi, with an arcane system that you pretty much need a guide or a lot of personal grit to get through, and to feed the cat 20 times. I didn't see a single tin of cat food in the last 9 days of diving, until finally finding my 20th on the afternoon of Day 59. Poor little guy. If you don't mind a little tail-end grind for stuff like that, a few hours of tedium to cap off a good game, Dave the Diver is not at all a chore to max out and you'll have a lot of fun most of the time. Keep the food in mind, ignore any guides at all until the end of the game and don't worry even if you fail some things - everything comes back in the postgame except the rations, and you can figure out what's left to do after the credits. I like games like that a lot.

FINAL FANTASY III (SQUARE, 1990) Finished: 19/2/24. Playtime: 18.2 hours. Here's the upset of the fucking century. I played Final Fantasy 3 DS ages ago and completely bounced off it. It was such a terrible game that I never made it far past the Viking bit. It was, by a distance, the worst Final Fantasy I had ever played, and might even have held that title in the face of spinoff titles like Dirge of Cerberus. Final Fantasy 3 DS is an awful game. Final Fantasy 3 Pixel Remaster is a fucking fantastic game, what the hell? What happened? It's not a game without flaws, to be sure, some of the warts of 1990 Famicom absolutely show through, particularly as the game runs on. But, particularly with the quality of life brought by the Pixel Remaster (quicksaves, no job change penalties, maps, etc.) the sheer quality of game underneath manages to shine through. Final Fantasy 3 is a game with heart, to a genuinely incredible degree. Every ounce of it drips with the joy of kids on an adventure with sticks in the woods behind the house. The dialogue is cheesy as shit in a completely-deliberate way, the story is simple and fun, and the game hardly even distinguishes between which party member is talking at any given point because it honestly does not matter. The jobs aren't guys in outfits, they're completely idealized forms of the class, because it isn't Kid 1 dressing up as a Black Mage, it's Kid 1 imagining himself as the perfect Black Mage. It rules. It's such an amazing vibe. What about the game, though? It's fun! Final Fantasy 3 invents the job system to be carried forward into all of the good Final Fantasies in the future, and while it's rudimentary, it's still a fun time. Jobs in this one are pretty fluid but reward you only for sticking with a single job, not a family of jobs or anything. There's nothing to port over between jobs, and no real reason to poke around. It's definitely the first stab at the system, but it's the first stab at an absolutely legendary system and it does a lot to elevate the game. They do play with it a bit early on, with dungeons that require all your guys to be wizards, but they don't really get too creative with it. Understandable, I think. There's also some fuckularity with job balance, particularly later as everything converges into the Eureka jobs late in the game. I did not succumb to this temptation, and kept my extremely aesthetic Viking - Devout - Knight - Magus to the end of the game. Screw you, Ninja. The dungeons and world are both improved over 2's versions to absolutely bonkers degrees. There's optional dungeons again, and the world is gated in incredibly unexpected ways (you get a fuckin submarine!!) to encourage exploration like how 1 did, rather than how 2 failed to. Dungeons themselves are much more organic in the scheme of 1, rather than the bespoke space-filling paths of 2. It's just a far better put-together game overall... up until the end. The Crystal Tower and World of Darkness are infamous among RPG fans for a reason, being an impressively-long series of dungeons including some awfully hard fights. Legendarily, the Famicom version of 3's Crystal Tower to endgame fiesta tends to last about three hours if you're paying attention and playing well, with no breaks to save and scant breaks to replenish your resources. It's much more palatable in the Pixel Remaster, with quicksaves to fall back on and quicker gameplay, but it's still an insane difficulty spike even after having done all optional content in the game. Still, it's barely a sin. The game looks amazing, with a lot of stupid little animations to enjoy and some absolutely wonderful messed up guys for enemy sprites. The game sounds amazing, with some of the best music I've heard in a Final Fantasy to date, including the modern ones. The game's fun and playing it feels personalized to a degree that 1 nearly landed and 2 never got close to. Scrungler, COOLRANCH, Luneth, and Greg represented a party not quite like how anyone else I know played it, and it brought me sincere joy to slug through. The achievements are in the vein of 2's, with less missable stuff. Get all the treasures (and all the hidden items, not in chests), meet every monster, and a handful of other crimes. Get all the Eureka weapons, get one guy to Job Level 99, stuff like that. Nothing nasty, and as long as you're cognizant of the handful of one-time dungeons, you can vibe through it pretty handily. Honestly shocked by how much I enjoyed Final Fantasy 3, clawing its way out from the bottom of the lists of all the Final Fantasies I've ever played. Miracles happen every day if we know where to look, don't they?

MEGA MAN LEGACY COLLECTION 2 (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 17/2/24. Playtime: 43 hours. It's back! While the games themselves were hit-and-miss, I did enjoy the improvement loop of the first collection enough to splash on the later Mega Men and see what opinions I could cook up on them. That's really the final goal of all of this, in the end: concocting capital-O Opinions. I'm finally slugging through Engage for the first time as I write this for exactly the same reason. Let's get cooking. Same caveats as the first post apply. MEGA MAN 7 (1995) I liked Mega Man 7. If 6 was just a kind of neutral good, this was just kind of a neutral good+. The transition to the SNES did wonders for how the game played at a fundamental level, having things like 'buttons' to work with in development, but my most common deaths were still 'jumped when I meant to slide or vice versa'. I wonder if any of these Men will change up the controls to fix that. Besides that, the Man typing was goofy but ultimately pretty memorable, and while a few were kinda shitty (Turbo, Shade), only one truly sucked out loud (Slash Man). The Wily stages were, as usual, a step down from the main game and occasionally super rude, but nowhere near as bad as in the bad games. The true final Wily fight, Wily Capsule 7, blew absolute ass, but if I docked a Mega Man for a crappy final phase of the final boss too hard I'd hate every one of these damn games. He took three E-tanks, which is silly, but he only took four tries to get through. Not that bad in the scheme of things. One point about Mega Man 7's design that I think keeps it below 4 is that I've actually beaten most of the game twice for a simple reason. 7 has a lot more optional collectibles (many of which can be bought in a shop too, so you can ...grind in your Mega Man), and the four letter plates in the first four stages combine to give you the Super Adaptor, without which I just washed out of Wily Castle, put the game down for six months, and ended up restarting. So I'd say I liked 7, but with a pretty non-trivial caveat alongside "liked" there. MEGA MAN 8 (1996) Mega Man 8 was a weird game. I've gathered it's a bit of a black sheep, and kind of killed mainline Mega Man games for like twenty years, and honestly I kinda see why. That's not to say I didn't find things to like about Mega Man 8 - the back half of the robot masters genuinely have some pretty good stages (Sword Man being the standout), and the couple of Gradius stages were always welcome on account of I just really like Gradius. The theming was weird overall, though, and the game suffered from a total lack of cohesion in design and a wild lack of memorability. The Wily stages, Gradius section aside, sucked insanely, though. Worse even than Mega Man 7's. Yeesh. While Mega Man 8 wasn't a bad game overall, if not a particularly good one, there's still an elephant in the room. Mega Man 8 is an unbelievably cringe game. The conversations are longer than any other game's, there's periodic anime cutscenes (and they're baaaaad), and just overall the game leans harder into having A Story than the previous games, and it is far to its detriment. Wily himself suffers the worst, with about a minute of roleplay before every single attempt at his two-phase fight - and worse, it involves Proto Man. MEGA MAN 9 (2008) After Mega Man was kill came Mega Man 9, a deliberate throwback in pretty much every way. And honestly? You all read my thoughts on the 8bit Mega Men - I was not excessively kind to them, and I really only liked a single game. I liked Mega Man 9, though. The stages are more hits than misses (though they have their misses), but the game chokes hard in the Wily stages. It's a Mega Man tradition, I guess. Still, I didn't find myself feeling as bad about them as I did many previous Mega Men on account of they did feel deliberately designed and not particularly slapped together. They were bad, but they were bad with a purpose. They represented an idea that wasn't quite realized, not just a total miss. I can respect that. The outlier to this was the antigravity Wily screens. There's two sections where Mega Man gets inverted and floated upwards, and your only method of movement is to fire the Buster, which imparts velocity on Mega Man left or right opposite to where you shot. I don't know why, given as the concept is simple and the screens are not long, but these two sections were maybe the most fun I've had with Mega Man as a franchise so far. Wild. MEGA MAN 10 (2010) Of all the games in the franchise I've played, I would certainly count Mega Man 10 among them. It wasn't a terrible game, and I definitely liked it more than 8 overall, but it failed to crack the better half of the games it's deliberately aping. It seems silly to mock a late-era Mega Man for the Men theming, but it commits a horrible sin: one of the Men is Strike Man, and his stage is generically sports-themed, not baseball specifically. What the fuck! Besides that, it's just a bit forgettable overall, and the weapons they provide are anemic at best except for Blade Man's, and Blade Man himself might have been my least favorite Man to date. Even the Wily stages just aren't really worth remarking on. There's another Devil, tedious flying blocks and all (why do they keep doing this), there's a take on the antigrav from 9 that's just worse designed and less fun, there's a series of fights against classic era Men but in the laziest way possible, where it's just generic diamonds that use their attack patterns. The Wily fights might or might not be hard, I have no earthly idea, because I had a whopping six E-tanks going into them and just wanted to tank through and end it. None of it is interesting to talk about. I'm shocked I strung together this many words about the game. The ranking now expands: Mega Man 4 > 9 > 7 > 6 > 2 > 10 > 5 > 8 > 1 > 3 THE REPLAYS Unlike the first collection, a clear of each game is insufficient for completion. Mega Men 9 and 10 have alternative characters (Proto Man in both, Bass in 10) who are playable, and there's an achievement for finishing each of those three bonus runs. MEGA MAN 9 [PROTO VER.] Proto Man is intended as a challenge run for 9, and I presume will be for 10 as well. His deal is that he gains back the buster charge and the slide from past Mega Men, but in exchange he has no access to the shop and takes double damage from all sources. It sounds nastier than it is, honestly - most of my deaths in this game are environmental because I'm kinda shit at platforming, so this downside only really killed me on bosses with any regularity. Lacking the shop does mean that he doesn't get access to the Energy Balancer, a nice little quality of life tool that makes weapon energy you pick up automatically siphon into unequipped weapons if it can't fill the one you've got, and I missed that a lot. It also means that he can't stock up on E-tanks to cheese his way through the final boss, which sucks because Wily 9 is a tremendous pain in the ass. I scavenged three of them through the game, though, and needed all three to beat Wily Capsule 9. Still, nothing really held me back, and I pulled off the Proto Man run in a few hours in a single session, and got to play more Mega Man 9 as a treat. MEGA MAN 10 [PROTO VER.] Interestingly, Proto Man's toolkit made large swathes of Mega Man 10 much better. He's the same as he was in 9, but with access to the shop. A lot of the more tedious bits of stage design in 10 ended up papered over significantly with the slide, access to charged shots, or even just the fact that he starts out with Rush Jet rather than only getting it for the back half of the main stages. I'd say I even had a decent amount of fun with Proto Man's attack on the first half of Mega Man 10! The Wily stages were absolute hell, though. Poor checkpointing, it turns out, sucks massively when you're taking double damage from everything. I took more combat and miniboss deaths as Proto Man in 10 as compared to 9 by a huge margin. All together, it just ended up kinda making me sad - there's clearly a decent game in Mega Man 10, just not quite fully realized, and instead it's just forgettable slop. During this run, I also watched a speedrun of Hard Mode just out of curiosity, and it brought to mind a conversation from the Discord from the other day: kinda like with 2D Sonic, Mega Man 10 seems like a game that it feels amazing to be really good at, but with the huge weight on its neck that unless I were predisposed to sink that time in, the first impression isn't good enough to convince me to put in the time to get to the point where the game 'becomes' good. Odd dilemma to have. MEGA MAN 10 [BASS VER.] Bass is a weird guy, kind of a mix of Proto and Mega Men. He's locked to rapid fire, no charge, and actually locked in place while he's shooting, which is hard to get used to. However, he can fire in any direction except straight down, which makes some things a hell of a lot easier. He retains the slide, mechanically, as a dash, but it doesn't squish his hitbox to get through one-tile attacks, but it does maintain momentum if you jump out of it. He doesn't get Jet or Coil, but can instead combine with his dog to go jetpack mode, flying around and firing a spread shot as long as energy remains. It's a nice way to skip whole sections of the game, but doesn't trivialize quite as much as you'd think from the description. The Bass run was, through some combination of experience and Bass' extras, by a good distance the easiest of the three runs. Just having seven-way shot smooths out so much shit on its own, let alone his other stuff. I ended up capped out on energy tanks by the end of the game, which made the Wily fights a little bit silly. Go ahead, hit me. I have more health than your phases combined. THE CHALLENGES They're back! The big change from the NES games is that there are no more cross-game challenges like the first legacy collection had. There's four discrete categories of challenges, one for each game, and you pick any 50 from 74 total to get gold medals in, as well as finishing the unrestricted boss rush for each game, which you'll almost certainly do along the way. Through some combination of no cross-game challenges, the screen mix challenges being limited to three longer runs (rather than the insanity of LC1), and more generous time limits overall, these ended up being worlds easier than the first set. On top of that, Mega Man 9 and 10 had all of their challenges in duplicate and triplicate, respectively, for Mega/Proto and Mega/Proto/Bass. I do want to call a little attention to this, because I think this actually enhanced Mega Man 9 pretty significantly - the loop changed from mastery and moving on in 1-8 to taking Mega Man through the pretty generous time limit, scouting places to change weapons and screens to use Jet, getting my gold over the course of a modest number of runs, and then turning around and fucking obliterating the same challenge as Proto Man. It felt fantastic. It felt so good that I'm genuinely tempted to reverse the 4/9 ranking at the top of the order. I'm sticking by my guns, for now, but I'll probably forget in the future and say that 9 was my favorite Mega Man. Not too big a shame, honestly! 10's generally-worse stages and need to do it three times outstayed the welcome, though. Typical Mega Man 10. Besides that, the list of challenges gives you the leeway to do zero <Buster Only> challenges, though all games have them, and zero Wily challenges if you so desire. I ended up getting golds on Wily 10, because one of the others is to do all nine Weapon Archive re-fights from 10 without dying - while the time limit is generous, time is absolutely not my issue with those. I stuck to bullying Wily a few more times. I'd already beaten him three times, after all - what's twice more? Honestly, there's not too much to say about the challenges compared to the first, and I think that's for the better overall. I definitely preferred this second set of games to the first, and while I wouldn't call any of them among my favorites, I am actually looking forward to starting Mega Man 11. That's obviously going to show up in this thread in time - if the first ten Mega Men and 30XX couldn't stop me, what the hell will?

it's actually not odd, i circled back with the big boss and it's a skin issue. that's something i can fix, i just gotta get up and do it

no, 1988 was only advanced enough for dual wielding. maria had a wizard staff in each fist and beat legions of men to death with them.

a shield??? embarrassing

what the fuck now i gotta jump on you to free the animals

he's got me as a hype man he could never run out of steam

yeah i was expecting to make a post like this for, like, 3 or 4, not "immediately" lol i really expected this one to be more like "ff2 is a weird ass game that has good ideas that ultimately don't quite coalesce" and it was not that basically, i expected it to be sonic cd

FINAL FANTASY II (SQUARE, 1988) Finished: 14/2/24. Playtime: 19.2 hours. It's very difficult to avoid making a "guess it wasn't so final after all!" kinda joke, won't lie. Final Fantasy 2 was not the followup to Final Fantasy I wanted, though I do respect it as a historical relic. While Final Fantasy was very much a JRPG (before that was even a term) in the direct lineage of Dungeons & Dragons and the Wizardry games, Final Fantasy 2 is recognizably Final Fantasy, in the way that later games in the series would shape as an identity. It's got characters and a plot, though neither piqued my interest at any point at all. It's got a bunch of mechanical changes that would stick around variously, like dual-wielding, bows, the front-back row system, MP, flexible spell targeting, the fucking perspective trick secret doors, so many others. Most importantly, though, it's got so many of the trappings of later Final Fantasies - chocobos, dragoons, a shitload of iconic enemy designs like malboros, bombs, Behemoth, the list goes on. Despite debuting the iconic jobs and the perennial focus on crystals, just waiting to be perfected in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Final Fantasy is very much a fairly generic RPG. Final Fantasy 2 is the first truly Final Fantasy-type game. It's also just a way worse one. The thing peddled about a lot about Final Fantasy 2 is its weird progression system. It forgoes things like "growths" and "experience" to instead have a kind of prototype Elder Scrolls-style progression, where you get more intellect by casting more black magic, and you get more HP by getting the piss kicked out of you repeatedly. There's certainly elements of this system that I like, honestly. In particular, spending MP to raise your maximum MP did, for quite a while, keep me using magic when I was on my way back to town to get my guys' MP meters bigger. My guys getting stronger via hitting things is reasonably sensible, and getting bulkier by getting whacked the same. The problem, in practice, is twofold. First, that you're really overrewarded for committing hard to a playstyle early and consistently and punished for not doing that. I've always been a strong proponent of setting up The Engine in games like this - magic is nice, sure, but if you can't use it on every fight, you're lugging a little dead weight compared to having an extra fighter. The tradeoff is absolutely that the wizard will show up better in high-stakes combats, like boss fights. The problem with 2 in this regard, then, is that by constantly having my wizard conserve MP in fights, my wizard is not only not gaining more MP to be able to use spells in more fights, but is not gaining the casting stats needed for magic to have an impact when I do need it. On top of that, by autoattacking with the staves alongside my melee guys, my wizard is growing strength at the same rate they are. I had earmarked Maria to be a wizard, but by the time the fourth or so dungeon was done, she was just doing more damage in melee than she was with spells on all targets besides the dedicated magic sinks like flans, and this included bosses. By the final third of the game, she was oneshotting even those with crits in melee. As I continued to unga bunga into things, everyone just kept getting better at unga bungaing into things, and as such why would I change my tactics to grind up intellect? Maria was my highest damage melee fighter for most of the game, and every time she was hitting guys with sticks, she was rolling on a table to gain more strength, to get better at hitting guys with sticks. Second, that every spell and weapon class levels independently, and the system for it stymies progressing badly if you commit hard to a playstyle. Essentially, every character has a proficiency from 1 to 16 with every spell and every type of weapon. Your weapon proficiency determines your accuracy and damage to a punishing degree; when I was rocking, like, 4s and 5s in proficiencies I had to swap weapons on Firion and he went through a period of missing over half his shots until he got to rank 2. Your spell proficiency determines both the efficacy and the cost of the spell; there's no Fira or Firaga in this, Fire simply goes from Fire I (low damage, 1 MP) to Fire XVI (huge damage, 16 MP). There's a few awful holes in this, like the fact that Esuna I only cures blindness, not even poison, and you have to spam cast it to level it up to be able to use it to cure anything worth curing, but that's a separate issue. One problem with this is availability of weapons. Let's say, out the gate, you decide to take Guy out with axes, like I did. You get the starting axe, get a few upgrades, get the mythril ore, get the mythril axe, it's gravy. That's it, though. The next better axe you can get is the Ogrekiller, which is in about five hours of gameplay. Maria got enough staff upgrades that I had a pair of handmedown staves that were still better in every aspect than the best axe Guy had found at any point. Swords went through a similar, but shorter draught. There was a single knife, a main gauche I found in a box, between the starting knife and the endgame knives I was getting in the final two hours. On the flip side, staves were being consistently upgraded all game long - but I only ever found a single copy of the final staff, the Diamond Mace, while I was getting the final axes and swords and spears lamped into me from every angle. Maria ended the game, after dominating all game long, with a Wizard Staff from about five hours ago in her offhand, because nothing better ever arrived. It was still better than training up one of her other proficiencies from rank 1, though. The other big problem with this is how the leveling actually works. The short of it is that, at the end of combat, you gain experience equal to how many times you attacked plus the enemies' average level minus your current rank. The problem is that enemies cap out around rank 7, with a few 8s in the deepest final dungeon. As you gain weapon experience, you gain damage, and you start to oneshot. Maria got to rank 12 in staves in a certain dungeon, and didn't gain a single point of experience outside of boss fights for the next about four dungeons, because she was oneshotting enemies, and the algebra for weapon experience gain started at -4 for her, and no fights were lasting long enough for her to get that positive, so it was just rounding up to 0 every time. This might sound like it's not a big deal, but for me it completely undermines the feeling of the system. It takes a system that's based on usage and consistent gradual progression and makes it so that overperformance is inevitable and grinds your progression to a complete halt. The intent was to make it so that you couldn't grind shitty enemies to raise your skills, but in so doing they created a system where not grinding is the best way to not progress by the midgame. Nobody wins. All the while, too, Maria is gaining strength from attacking every once in a while, and I'm getting new staves, helping her continue to hit oneshot thresholds until the end of the game. Spells work identical to this, incidentally, with the extra caveat that you also need to grind up your MP to be able to spam them for progress. All told, these just combine to make leveling feel like an impossibly smooth progress with absolutely zero ding! moments, an endless series of +12 max HP and +1 strengths that all mean less than nothing, and all combine to feel worse than even 1's monolithic +1 HP levels. Further not helping this is the encounter variety and world design of 2. To put it bluntly, it's garbage. Monsters are recycled, not even recolored, at preposterous rates, including bosses showing up as trash mobs in the very next dungeon all the time. The encounter rate is obscenely high, eating time up for, as said, little progression, but with monsters that I quickly grew to oneshot and, even when they acted, generally did a pittance of damage. This carried forward all the way to the final dungeon, with a majority of enemies inflicting no major debuffs, being oneshot by 3/4 of my party, being outsped by 4/4 of my party, and if they got their action off it was to bite off 43 of Guy's 5,000 HP or to cast Fire XI for 18/12/24/31 across the party. On the other hand, it walked that tightrope of being both plodding tedium and high octane action, as interspersed with these losers that I could autobattle and alt-tab off of were things like coeurls, who caused an instant kill with every single attack they landed on me, or death knights, who would chomp off one to three thousand health off a guy with each attack. About half the dungeons had some random encounter or monster-in-a-box that was just ah, I hit autobattle unthinkingly during the fight intro and now my guest party member has died instantly, and possibly so has Guy. It's the worst of both worlds, where you can ignore 96% of random encounters and let autoattack do its thing, but that 4% might just game over you. Topically, the only game overs I recall taking in the entirety of the game was a chest with a Lamia Queen and six Coeurl. I opened it the first time, focused the lamia down, and four coeurl each landed an autoattack for 0 damage and instantly killed a party member. Reload. The second time, I was ambushed, giving the enemy a free turn, and four coeurl each landed an autoattack for 0 damage and instantly killed a party member. Reload. The third time was identical to the second. The fourth time, my first four actions killed four coeurl before the enemy got to act, and my living three party members finished the fight after the enemy acted. Horrible fight. That brings us to the saving grace of Final Fantasy 2: world and dungeon design. They're both worse than Final Fantasy's. The world is almost completely devoid of any feature to make you want to go exploring, being only a series of key locations that you must go to in order and have no real ability or incentive to go out of that order. Even once you get the boat, you gain the ability to go to about three total new places, and these are the three places you end up having to go in rough order to get to the next step of the quest. It's the most terribly barren linear-pretending-to-be-open world I've seen in a video game, possibly ever. The dungeons, meanwhile, are far bigger than the ones in 1, and they're comprised entirely of space-filling paths, multiple mutually inaccessible sections in a floor, perspective trick walls, doors that go nowhere, damage tiles, warp tiles, and exactly two trapdoors across the whole game. There's genuinely nothing to recommend about the dungeon design of Final Fantasy 2, it's among the worst I've seen in an RPG even before you factor in the insane encounter rate. To cap it off: the plot and characters are complete nothings and the music isn't nearly as good as in the first game, outside of the motifs that the first game already laid out like the generic battle theme. The dungeoneering themes, notably, have this absolutely pounding tension and pressure to them like in Nolan's worst film, Dunkirk, all the time, while you continue to eviscerate legions with no challenge. It's deeply annoying. 100%ing 2 is a lot more annoying than 1 for a simple reason: shit is now missable. The requirements are pretty much exactly the same: get all the treasure, meet all the monsters, learn the new Key Words that function as a prototype dialogue system, beat the game. This has a wrench in it that a handful of dungeons are one-time visits, and those chests are permanently inaccessible after you leave. Keep on your toes. Some of the enemies in these dungeons, but not all, are also inaccessible after leaving, and there's a worldchanging event midway through that changes the encounter tables on the overworld and removes a handful of enemies from the spawn pool. You have to be fairly meticulous and pay attention while going through the game to get it all, as compared to 1's far more vibes-forward approach where you enjoy the game and go back later. Unfortunately, I've got a bad feeling this is going to be the norm going forward. 2 does deserve a special shout for a pair of achievements: maxing out proficiency in a single weapon and a single spell. Maxing out a spell is simple yet tedious: load up on mana restoration items and go into a dungeon with damaging floor tiles. Turn off encounters, take a step, pause, and heal everyone individually. Progression is based entirely on how many times you cast the spell. I had to heal 99 ethers and 1 elixir worth of times (I dunno how many that ends up being, ballpark 2,400 mana of 12-15 cost spells) over the course of like four minutes to top it off. The weapon one is harder because, as said, you have to attack multiple times against your strongest available foes to even gain weapon experience past a certain point, and there's still several hundred experience left to earn after that point. People point to downgrading your gear to tier 1 shit, but I am a genius: enter the Healing Staff. The Healing Staff does no damage, and heals the target... but it's a staff. I found the worst trash I could, grabbed lunch, and set everyone but Maria to defend while Maria autoattacked with the Healing Staff. Start a new battle every six or so minutes because you can only level up once per combat, and Bob's your uncle. All told, I did not enjoy Final Fantasy 2, if that wasn't gently clear from all that. On the one hand, I think that it's quite a bad game with very little, if anything, to recommend it. On the other hand, it's quite a bad game in that uniquely late-80s-early-90s way, where a sequel would take a huge random shot in another direction and, depending on who you ask, flop utterly at it or be the continued-unmatched best game in the series. I'm glad, if nothing else, that I gutted through Final Fantasy 2 as part of the historic record, because it was at least fascinating to see the DNA of Final Fantasy coalescing so suddenly and so recognizably, including a lot of things I just assumed 4 had invented. We'll get there in time, though. Ever onwards...

interesting, that box has been there for years for me i wonder if it was set to only appear for staff for a while and the new migration just fixed it and nobody knew???

events have been around for over a decade and i don't think a single one's been scheduled since 2011 (they just all got scheduled as long series), you're just noticing them for the first time this, however, might be a recent break. i'll take a look at it after work today e: oh hey the recent forums update broke badges

yet somehow you pulled it off. masterful post

i like blitzball, you fool get in e: a fun fact: per steam global achievement metrics, fewer people have Won A Single Game Of Blitzball In FFX-2 than Have 100% Completed FFX

got it on the bookmarks lol

FINAL FANTASY (SQUARE, 1987) Finished: 12/2/24. Playtime: 15.5 hours. The entire project that is this thread is inherently sisyphean in nature. Half the fun of it is spinning up sub-projects that sound absolutely obscene from the outset, like "a game for each letter" or "all of the Yakuzas", and then grinding through hundreds or thousands of hours of that over real-life years for a series of 128x128 pixel badges on a social media platform and the right to feel extra moral when talking smack about something online. Spite is a hell of a motivator, and I'm good at convincing myself I'm doing something to spite a straw nobody, if nothing else. Let's start a new, horrible chapter. We're not stopping with the first one, oh no. I've purchased, organized, and lined up main numbered games 1 through 13 (skipping 11 of course) for gradual submission here. We're gonna see if I can rekindle that JRPG fire that I haven't had in my heart since sophomore year of college, over a decade ago, and we're gonna start where it all began. I've had a long relationship with the Final Fantasy series, one of the longest consistent involvements of my entire gaming life. I got my start with the Pizza Hut demo disc that had the first bit of Final Fantasy 8 on it, and I thought it was fine, but nothing like the true PSX JRPG, which was obviously Legend of Dragoon. A neighbor kid would lend me disk 1 of Final Fantasy 7 at some point, and I'd slug most of the way through it, but it was no Legend of Dragoon, so I never asked for the second disk. My next involvement would be Final Fantasy 10, and that game completely blew my prepubescent mind. Out of all the Ultimas, all the Wizardries, all the Mights and the Magics, all the Fallouts and Icewinds Dale, and yes, even Legend of Dragoon, that was the first RPG I gutted all the way through, and I loved it. It remains, to this day, the only soundtrack for a game I've ever bought. I know all the words to Otherworld, and if you get me drunk enough, I will karaoke it and I will sound horrible doing it. The PS2 was the era of Final Fantasy that hit at the age where I was perfectly poised to think Final Fantasy is the coolest thing ever. I'd get 10-2 and later 12, and beat both, and those three would remain the core of my Final Fantasy favorites until the present day. Part of this project is actually seeing how they've held up, honestly, but we'll get to that in a long-ass while. The PS2 would also give us Dirge of Cerberus, a game so crappy and edgy that I thought it was lame at like fifteen and quit it forever around the 70% mark, which is a hell of a feat. Still, 3/4 topping the overall list ain't bad at all. My later teens would come with more of an emphasis on handheld gaming for various reasons up to and including college. My venerable GBA SP and then DS would hold many Final Fantasies across the entire quality spectrum. I'd play the 5 and 6 ports on the GBA - I loved 5, and liked 6 but found it gently overrated by the internet of the day - and eventually fail to get far into either of the 1+2 package and get through about half of Tactics Advance before deciding it sucked. The DS carried horror in its bosom, frontloading the 3 and 4 DS ports, both of which I found to be awful games, though I'd actually slug my way through 4 eventually just to say I did it, in probably the first glimmer of what would become the me who would make this thread. I'd eventually play about 35 minutes of Tactics A2, a game I really never gave a fair shot to, and play all the way through the dark horse Revenant Wings, a game I'm positive is nowhere near as good as I remember it being and I'm uninterested in disabusing myself of those delusions. Around this time, my cousin would give me his PSP, and I'd play Dissidia very briefly for the novelty and then 85% of Tactics before deciding it sucked. I've got a contentious relationship with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, to put it gently. Y'all saw the Fell Seal post. Then I'd kind of just... stop. Finishing Final Fantasy 5 in my freshman year of college would be followed by, of all things, my first run of Pokemon SoulSilver to make me realize that I just wasn't feeling JRPGs anymore as a concept. To top that off, I never bought a PS3, and didn't buy a PS4 until Kingdom Hearts 3 came out, so if I had wanted to move on from there my options were crappy PC ports of the day. I'd go into hibernation, having beaten all the SNES and all the PS2 Final Fantasies and no other, and I was content. I got into the alpha and beta tests for Final Fantasy 14's original release, and it was so awful that I literally didn't believe people when they said "the game is good now" until my wife picked it up in Shadowbringers and I joined her just to see. I pretty much just didn't sink my teeth into any Final Fantasy, besides a little romp through 12 where I tried to Vaan solo the game and got bored about halfway through, from about 2011 until I picked up a 14 sub in 2020 after my time with World of Warcraft was finally at its true end. Even then, I played 14 exclusively as an MMORPG and skipped all the cutscenes after level about 15. Love the game; the only cutscene set I've watched in full is the saga of T'laqa Tia, my homie. But, you know, it would always rankle a bit. 13's been sitting in my Steam library for longer than I can remember, to the point where I have no recollection of ever buying it. I'd look at it, occasionally, with this feeling of a love lost. Time once was I could sit down with a GBA Player on a Gamecube and grind shit out in Final Fantasy 6 for hours. That little completionist part of my brain that was starting to take root in my later 20s before going apeshit as I crossed 30 would always grumble about how I'd beaten 4-6 and 10-12, not even a contiguous swathe of games like I have Resident Evil. And Revenant Wings, of course. I accumulated copies of 8, 9, and the 10/10-2 package over time and always intended to get into them and never did. The JRPG ennui extended, too - I own two Tales games for some reason, never touched either, as well as The Last Remnant, which is the most PS3-ass game ever concocted. Etrian Odyssey finally reunlocked that part of my brain, and then the pixel remaster package finally went on sale. It's time. Final Fantasy has aged with absolutely startling grace. With what amounts to quality of life improvements and not terribly much more, it's nowhere near the best RPG I've ever played, but considering all the nothing it had to pull on for reference back in 1987, it's a genuine landmark. There's just something kind of timeless about all of it - the little sprite men walking around, the batshit attempts to translate Amano's concept art onto the Famicom, the bonkers gameworld that is very transparent about being a series of vehicle gates, the unmitigated pettiness of dungeon design, all of it is just so cowboy game design. It rules, even if there are a lot of objective and subjective flaws to it. The game's intended progression is even fairly concisely communicated, intuitive, and easy to follow, without anything like a quest log - until you get to the step where you invent the airship, and then the game flies instantly into fucking Sierra moon logic. I managed to slug my way to promotion after looking up how to get the airship, and from there I just had to guide out the rest of the game. I would never have figured any of it out. By the standards of today, it's actually even a fairly breezy game if you don't mind following a little bit of a guide, with ingame maps and the bestiary able to take a bit of the sting out of the asshole design of the times. The only party wipe SLEEN the Red Mage, GORGE the White Mage, SKORT the Warrior, and REGGIE the Black Mage ever suffered was, when I was filling out the bestiary, a Warmech used Nuke on two turns back to back and killed 3/4 of my party, and then the last one died moments later. It's uncompromising, and the difficulty is all over the fucking place, but it's not a hard game to get into if you've got a certain tolerance for older stuff. It's not hard to 100%, either. You essentially just need to beat the game, get all the treasure, and fill out the bestiary. The pixel remaster includes a chest count for every location in the world, so finding any missing treasure is simple as anything; I missed a single chest in the Cavern of Earth playing organically. Filling out the bestiary is only more involved because there are three rare encounters that only happen in specific places: the Tyrannosaur in the overworld's big desert, the Warmech in B4F of the penultimate dungeon, and the Iron Golem in B4F of the ultimate dungeon. These aren't even obscenely rare by modern RPG sensibilities, just 1/64 encounter chances. Besides those three, I only missed a single monster (the Soldier on B3F of the penultimate dungeon isn't even a rare spawn, I just never saw one) in my entire romp through the game without a mind to fill it out as I went. A single clear, nothing missable, and a short loop around the world to clean up before you go kill Chaos. I'm glad I gave Final Fantasy the time of day. The rest of the project won't necessarily be twelve more Final Fantasies in twelve more posts, but they'll be trickling in as I do them for a long while now, so I hope you'll join me for this long ass project.

man and i thought i had scorn for fe7 lol jesus e: we should renormalize bullying imo

this isn't even an unpopular video game opinion, it's been bothering me for a whole day now you're just mad that the definition of a word has escaped what you think is the "proper" definition 'rpg elements' mean 'number progression' to most of everyone, and you think that's wrong, and the opinion is that you think everyone else is using the term incorrectly, but the problem of language is that they aren't, because that's what it means to most of everyone else. if you're in the deep minority, as you clearly are, you're wrong here. it's not an 'unpopular opinion', it's just raging against the dying of the light. feel free to think that 'rpg elements' shouldn't mean 'numeric skill-buying progression', sure, but 'rpg elements' have literally never been majorly equated with narrative choice in games in the whole time i've been around. condolences. e: i'm not even disagreeing with you here as to what 'rpg elements' Should mean, i'm just saying this isn't an 'unpopular opinion' nearly as much as it's a 'i don't like how the kids use words now'

you're correct in remembering that this used to be a feature about... i dunno, two major iterations of ip.board ago, maybe three. they stripped it out in favor of the info panel the guy above me posted about a long time ago and to my knowledge a full set of posts-by-user for a thread is no longer accessible including to we staffers. i'll take a look into it this weekend and see if there's a disabled option somewhere but i'm fairly sure the option is just gone and has been replaced by various options for that info panel