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Are Final Fantasy VI & XII the best main series FFs of all time?

Sigourn

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I've been looking for JRPGs that may catch my attention for a while now. Being 24 years old makes it hard for me to go back to a genre I enjoyed while I was a teenager. Western RPGs have spoiled me, and dialogue exchanges such as this one:

- "I need to talk to the King"
- "Ok, wait a second."
- "King! Your soldier doesn't trust you anymore."
- "Ok."
- "Okay soldier, enter!"
- "You are not one of my soldiers anymore."

Doesn't cut it for me. I kid you not, that's what Final Fantasy IV's intro dialogue plays out, more or less. Anyhow, I started wondering about the Final Fantasy franchise. I've played games VI, VII, IX, X, and XII. Those are the ones that are most popular, for the most part. Then I started making some comparisons:

- Final Fantasy VI had a really diverse cast. It had an interesting story that was otherwise fairly easy to follow. It was the pinnacle of sprite-based Final Fantasy games, and turn-based combat (in Final Fantasy).
- Final Fantasy XII has, I think, the smallest cast of all 3D Final Fantasy games, with six playable characters. Yet it has arguably the most mature story. There's no romance in it. It's all about politics. There are a lot of sidequests, and the excellent Hunt system. It has two Superbosses that you simply can't Attack Reel your way through, and you simply can't buff up your stats like you could in Final Fantasy X. Every location is distinctively unique and has an appropiate reason to be there, whereas in other titles I couldn't help but feel some of them were place holders, "We need a location for this particular scene and nothing else", like that one where Zack used to live. Final Fantasy XII had what is probably my favorite battle system in any videogame.

So, with all that said, what do you think? Are these two the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy series? For the purpose of this thread, the Tactics games don't count.

No poll, as I'd rather get some real answers with arguments.
 

Sigourn

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Limited and simple dialogue of old games is heavan compared to endless, boring drivel you see in most modern games.

But we are not comparing Final Fantasy to Tides of Numenera, but Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy X was boring drivel.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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The original American release of Final Fantasy IV (as FF2 on the SNES) had a poor translation, but I'd still take that original dialogue over the overwrought, melodramatic, long-winded exposition that passes for dialogue writing in most RPGs of the last two decades. +M And that includes the cringe-inducing pseudo-Shakespearian writing in FF XII. Not to mention FF XII's poor gameplay, which gutted the traditional FF combat system in order to replace it with an MMORPG-ish system where you watch your characters fight according to a simplistic series of if-then statements (the gambit system).

You were half right, in that Final Fantasy VI was and remains the best Final Fantasy, main series or otherwise.
 

Sigourn

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And that includes the cringe-inducing pseudo-Shakespearian writing in FF XII. Not to mention FF XII's poor gameplay, which gutted the traditional FF combat system in order to replace it with an MMORPG-ish system where you watch your characters fight according to a simplistic series of if-then statements (the gambit system).

I disagree with the dialogue being cringe-inducing. My only issue was Vaan's annoying voice. I think the gameplay is fantastic, it is certainly much, much better than the traditionally boring turn-based gameplay, which was neither complex nor strategic. At least the Gambit system demanded a bit more thought, especially considering you would need to improvise in the middle of battles somethings, bringing back the "pause" aspect of the decision-making.
 

MRY

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In my opinion, jRPGs fit better with simple plots because when you have a jRPG that's really about international political economy and the complexities of religious doctrine, it's a little silly that the player's only verb is "fight." It all but guarantees that the actions the player is allowed to undertake are totally irrelevant to the action and simply filler content. When the story is, "A mighty evil awakens and must be killed by a hero powerful enough to face it!" then the gameplay actually has some relevance to the story.
 

Deuce Traveler

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
I agree that FF VI is the best of the regular series, though if we can add in the FF-related games, then I would say that Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions beats it out.

FF XII would have been great with a further reduction to four characters: Basch, Ashe, Balthier, and Fraan. I couldn't fucking stand Vaan and Penelo, which is unfortunate since the game is built mainly from their perspectives. Those two are blank slates with no character growth. Even Fraan with her chewbacca-with-tits role has a mysterious past with Balthier and I especially appreciate how they respect and trust one another. Take out Vaan and Penelo, focus more on Basch's quest to clear his name and honor, Ashe's quest to right the wrong's done with her, and build up more of the platonic side of Balthier's and Fraan's relationship built on their misfit status and dependence upon one another and this game could have been great. Also, some of the dungeon design in FF XII needed work. I rage quit the game during some tower-like dungeon once I got disoriented and forgot where I was in it. If the game focused more on Basch or Balthier I may have been a bit more emotionally invested in slugging it out, but instead I decided there were other games more worthy of my time. I think that's when I decided to beat Romance of the Three Kingdoms X for the umpteenth time.
 

Hobo Elf

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Those two are blank slates with no character growth

Lies. Go and actually play the game. Vaan has _actual_ character growth, something that doesn't actually happen in most RPGs. Vaan comes off as an immature child, because he is a child. Eventually he grows up as he is finally capable of accepting the death of his brother, and is able to use this newfound wisdom guide Ashe into accepting the death of her husband. Vaan's boasting about becoming a pirate was just a way for him to cope with loss in the only way a teen is able to, so that's why it comes off as obnoxiously immature.

Penelo is the only character who truly sucks, and that's because her whole character arc was cut completely from the game. One of the writers even said that their favorite character is Penelo because of her backstory, which we'll never get to see, unfortunately.
 
Last edited:

Siveon

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Christ not this fucking thread again. Of all the megathreads, we really need a Final Fantasy megathread.
 

Sigourn

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I agree that FF VI is the best of the regular series, though if we can add in the FF-related games, then I would say that Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions beats it out.

FF XII would have been great with a further reduction to four characters: Basch, Ashe, Balthier, and Fraan. I couldn't fucking stand Vaan and Penelo, which is unfortunate since the game is built mainly from their perspectives. Those two are blank slates with no character growth. Even Fraan with her chewbacca-with-tits role has a mysterious past with Balthier and I especially appreciate how they respect and trust one another. Take out Vaan and Penelo, focus more on Basch's quest to clear his name and honor, Ashe's quest to right the wrong's done with her, and build up more of the platonic side of Balthier's and Fraan's relationship built on their misfit status and dependence upon one another and this game could have been great. Also, some of the dungeon design in FF XII needed work. I rage quit the game during some tower-like dungeon once I got disoriented and forgot where I was in it. If the game focused more on Basch or Balthier I may have been a bit more emotionally invested in slugging it out, but instead I decided there were other games more worthy of my time. I think that's when I decided to beat Romance of the Three Kingdoms X for the umpteenth time.

I agree that Vaan and Penelo are annoying. It is unfortunate becasue part of what makes the rest of the cast so great is that you don't get to play as them right from the beginning. So in the end they are all introduced in very cool scenes. By comparison, you get introduced to Vaan by... fighting with rats. And Penelo by... taking a bag of gold from Vaan's hands. Not exactly what I would call memorable.

Basch's japanese voice acting is great, really samurai-like.

 

Karellen

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Somehow, I still keep being surprised how Final Fantasy VI is so often propped up as the apex of the series. It's a game I enjoyed a lot when I first played it, but nowadays, it's startlingly difficult for me to get into. It's big and exceedingly ambitious, but it suffers from... well, I guess the problem is that aside of the story and the drama involving the characters, there isn't really all that much there to enjoy. I feel that it's a very uneven game, and for every remarkable and memorable scene with fun, quotable writing, it drags you through tedious, overlong slogs haunted by some of the worst background music Uematsu erred to write.

A large problem is that the actual gameplay in FFVI is surprisingly poor, and not in an inoffensive, easily ignored way as is the case in many old JRPGs with bad gameplay. The magicite system is one of the worst character growth systems in an FF game (it is better than FFII, I guess), and while I like that the characters have unique abilities, most of them fall into one of two categories - almost entirely pointless or special attacks you might as well spam every turn because there's no reason not to. The game holds together quite well early on, when you have no magicite and you mostly can't pick your own party, so you have to deal with the strenghts and weaknesses of the characters the game has saddled you with. Once you start to get magicite, though, the game starts to nosedive, since most of the characters you keep getting in your party are almost entirely superfluous.

Other than that, the dungeon design involves entirely too many bland caverns, and the combat is equally bland, so neither one can really make up for the other. It says something that the combat mechanics have some pretty fundamental bugs in them, but you could play through the entire game and never notice, because the fights are by and large a formality. Nowhere does the game suffer more from this than the the World of Ruin. It is a very cool idea - you play through a normal linear JRPG, until suddenly you've got this full open world where you get to find your party again, only this time you can explore in any order you like. The open world quite literally lacks punch, however, because there are only a handful of places which pose any real threat, so a lot of people resent that part of the game.

FFIV and FFVII are the two Final Fantasy games that I keep going back to with some regularity. One of the things I've noticed is that in my old age, I increasingly appreciate good pacing in games, JRPGs in particular, which of course is something that is in very short supply. FFIV has flat characters and an often ridiculous story, but it's also the briskest and most eventful FF game, and the way it keeps changing your party to keep the combat interesting and somewhat challenging is clever. FFVII benefits from its starting Midgar segment being probably the most driven, most story-packed beginning any RPG has ever had. FFXII is by no means a bad game (though probably my least favourite Yasumi Matsuno game, all in all), but narrative drive is something it certainly lacks a lot.
 

mushaden

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I have never finished a Final Fantasy game. I've played IV, V, VI, VII, and some IX. Closest I got was in V on an emulator (final boss was too much). I don't actually completely hate JRPGs, but I have played so many and finished so few (Chrono Trigger, Grandia II, Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics, and... that's all I think). I might try XII if it gets an official PC release.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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I disagree with the dialogue being cringe-inducing. My only issue was Vaan's annoying voice. I think the gameplay is fantastic, it is certainly much, much better than the traditionally boring turn-based gameplay, which was neither complex nor strategic. At least the Gambit system demanded a bit more thought, especially considering you would need to improvise in the middle of battles somethings, bringing back the "pause" aspect of the decision-making.
You opened this thread by complaining about the terseness of part of Final Fantasy IV's introduction, which admittedly suffers along with the rest of the game from a poor translation, but this intro is far more extensive than your excerpt without dragging on. Indeed, FF IV in general has quite good pacing, though in this it benefits from being shorter than FFs VI through X. I should have noted in my previous post that Final Fantasy XII opens with roughly 45 minutes of exposition, not even dialogue as such, but narration to explain a portion (and only a small portion!) of the backstory, even before it sends you rat-catching with Vaan. This is emblematic of FF XII as a whole, which has terrible pacing, and is about 50 percent longer than FFs VI through X. There is one point in the plot clearly marking a halfway point, where time skips forward by a few months in which the characters have been waiting back in the starting city before setting forth again, and the rest of the game after this is twice as long as it should be (without engaging in optional time-wasters) yet has remarkably little plot development or even characterization; instead, you are forced to trudge through geographic zone after geographic zone to reach a mild plot advancement directing you to the next destination, and repeat this until you reach the final battle.

Similarly, Final Fantasy IV not only introduced the Active Time Battle (ATB) system but made it more interesting than in later games by having as many as 5 characters in the party (as opposed to 4 in FF VI and IX, and just 3 in VII, VIII, and XII) and by frequently switching characters in the party due to plot developments, until the party becomes fairly stable late in the game. FF XII's gambit system, on the other hand, is nearly as bad as the system used in FF XIII; they both remove control from the player. There isn't much interesting you can do with the simple if-then statements the gambit system utilizes, so in the end you mostly sit back and watch your characters auto-attack enemies, auto-heal party members with low HP, auto-resurrect dead party members, etc., occasionally pausing the game to use an item or cast a spell that isn't automatically activated by your gambits. The combat system is easily the most boring of any main series FF up to that point.
 

DragoFireheart

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Limited and simple dialogue of old games is heavan compared to endless, boring drivel you see in most modern games.

Sometimes, less is more.

The series peaked with Final Fantasy 6 imo. 7 was the start of the decline.
 

Falksi

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2/4 & 5 are vastly underrated games IMO. Dialogue ain't owt sparkling, but the overall adventure of both (not to mention the job system of 5) are just a ton of fun.
But then again I loved 10, so you may think my taste weird.
 

Rahdulan

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2/4 & 5 are vastly underrated games IMO. Dialogue ain't owt sparkling, but the overall adventure of both (not to mention the job system of 5) are just a ton of fun.
But then again I loved 10, so you may think my taste weird.

To be fair, FF2's greatest contribution was laying down the groundwork for the SaGa series.
 

Wayward Son

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I just finished the Dawn of Souls remake of Final Fantasy 1 and can easily say, without a doubt, that it is the best of the Final Fantasies I've played and can recommend it with massive confidence. You could see the Wizardry and D&D influences in there. Also, it had so little dialog, but for the most part, it was written well, what was there. The story was simple and generic, but was just an excuse to go do shit in the world. Also has replayability because of different party builds that are possible. Good game all around, if a little easy by the end (though Chaos Shrine and he Final boss make up for that). Just don't play the added dungeons until later on, otherwise the levels you'd gain from completing them trivialize portions of the game. Also, very little grinding was actually present in my first playthrough of it. It simply wasn't necessary (except because of the Earthguft Shrine, see above for opinion on that).
 

Beastro

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FFII and III (NA) are the best.

FFII captured the childish fairytale melodrama endemic to the genre so well while FFIII had a lot of neat ideas, character development and aiming to be serious without becoming tryhard like FFVII and later ones were like (Even FFIX as much as I love it had a over edgy main story).

Of the two, III does it the most for me. It makes full use of the long gameplay of a JRPG to tell a neat story without stupid twists and turns and that shows in Kefka, whoever shows himself to be the main antagonist until the halfway mark, and until that happens you get hints and a sense of his deepening madness develop over time. Hell, after he does his big bad act, you don't see him until the end of the game that is a good third of the gameplay/half the story, all his character development and villainy is established by then, all that's left is to face him down and kill the fucker.
 

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