Ok, but actual most fun I’ve had playing a final fantasy in a long time has to go to:
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So apparently World of Final Fantasy 30% off on Asian Playstation Store. I just bought a PS4 Pro yesterday and this seems like a good deal. I’ve never bought a PS4 game digitally, and I’m a bit worried about the download speed, especially since the latest FFXV patch took me roughly 90 minutes to download. Still, that price is really tempting. What do you think?
Yeah the PS4’s download speed is bad and sony seems to choke their upload based on traffic, but you should be fine to download/purchase it, and put the PS4 to sleep. The game will download in the background as long as you didn’t go in and change the option at system level to disallow an internet connection in standby.
Also for what it’s worth, WoFF has a tiny filesize comparatively since it was originally a Vita game, so even on the PS4’s slow intake you should download the 10gb pretty quickly through the day or overnight.
Final Fantasy 11 had some of the best music in the series, a well constructed world and generally good story, and if it hadnt been a miserably grindy and sadistic Everquest 2 era MMO and instead was a normal series entry people would still refer to it fondly. [I]Fight me[/I]
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I’ve always liked the idea of FF games (well, of the SNES-era ones mainly), but I’d only played the first disc of FF7 until last year when I finally found out that streaming is a thing, so now I’m most of the way into FF6. I’ve got people helping me in the chat and we have a good time!
But I’m so conflicted! On the one hand, those teenagers in the 90s weren’t wrong, the music is great, the graphics are great, and ok the story isn’t as grandiose as I’d been led to believe but it’s super cool that a game in those days could even have a long and complicated plot, or even a plot at all, so I’m having a good time.
BUT THE BATTLES!
Half the time, all I want to do is walk across the screen to the cave exit, and I’m stopped three times along the way! If I hadn’t been streaming, and if streamy people weren’t so nice to spend time with, there’s no way I would complete the game.
All I can think the whole time is… is this a feature to someone? Was there a dedicated audience who just loved grinding and random encounters, and turn-based fighting even? (I know, it’s grouchy of me not to enjoy turn-based fighting, but somehow I just never had to deal with it in my formative years and so now it doesn’t feel fun to me). Maybe it’s just because I’m not so used to it, but I really struggle to see where the fun is supposed to come in.
Of course, as a result, I sabotage my own chance at enjoying it by never really learning how to play the system deeply. The only reason I’m not just mashing “Fight” is that I’d keep dying if I did. But when I can, that’s exactly what I do, because those battles are so boring to me. Naturally this makes me so uncurious about the whole system that I always forget summons are available until after a stream has finished. And on top of that I never have quite figured out what equipping espers does and which characters to give which esper to…
…ah. You can’t type all that without realising you’re the problem. Clearly, I need to learn to figure out how the game works rather than just try and blast through it to find out how the story goes. But I feel so left behind by a lot of it. I’m guessing that’s because I don’t have the manual / issues of Nintendo Power that kids back then had.
Anyway. I do like FF6 and playing it has been a good experience so far, which is weird, because I dislike almost all the components it’s made out of apparently.
Except the music, that’s brilliant.
(hello! this is my first post and i don’t know how)
The coffee shop on-campus where I work was blasting “Liberi Fatali” behind the counter just now, hell yeah.
Y’know, I give FF8 a lot of shit, but damn if it’s soundtrack isn’t impeccable.
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I still feel like IX was my favourite numbered, with Tactics as my favourite overall. Tactics was the first game that I played which had so much intrigue in its story, while IX is just brimming with charm. They’re wonderful games and contain some really great characters.
One that’s quickly becoming a strong favourite in the series is XIV.I was never an MMO person and FFXI made me believe that Final Fantasy couldn’t change that either, but I’ve fallen for that game enough to SSLP it. It’s one I strongly suggest fans try out, even if they just treat it as a single player game with some co-op in some of the story beats.
I was on the fence about trying WoFF too, but I ended up grabbing the Vita version since it seems to suit that better for me. Final Fantasy Pokemon could be fun?
Steam is having a sale on some of the older Final Fantasy games this week, and with so many people really praising Final Fantasy IX as one of the better ones, I’m tempted in picking it up. Does anyone know if the Steam/PC port of it is any good? I’ve already played some of the Steam version of FF7 and wasn’t too annoyed by it (hilariously uprezzed models and MIDI bleep-bloops aside).
I have heard the PC ports of the FF games are low effort cash ins and of poor quality. That even the music is distorted. I have never bought or tried them to check for myself however.
You would be better off picking up a PS1 and SNES from a convention and purchasing the games. Or DLing emulators and grabbing the ISOs and BIOS off the internet.
please obey the law.
Conversely, I would say that if the terribleness of the Steam port of FF7 didn’t bother you then you’ll probably be positively delighted by the Steam port of FF9. I haven’t played a lot of it, but at the very least it has HD assets (though not to the point of putting the game in widescreen or anything) and decent keyboard and mouse controls.
The other FFs I’m not so sure about. I thought I heard a rumor that people replaced the awful sprites in the Steam version of FF5 with the originals, is there any truth to that?
I watched someone stream the FF9 steam port and it seemed really good to me. I didn’t notice any major problems with it, and it included handy quality of life features such as a fast forward button and the ability to disable random encounters. There are also temporary cheats for if you ever get stuck on a fight and can’t find a way to win and don’t want to grind, or permanent cheats to make you overpowered if you don’t feel like dealing with the combat.
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Is there a cheat to make stealing stuff bearable? Because that would actually be amazing. I actually kinda like draw grinding in FF8, but stealing from bosses in 9 was just the worst thing.
I’m afraid that there is no stealing cheat. If you want to know all the cheats available, you can read about them here.
If there is a mod that replaces the sprites, I haven’t found it. I did some searching around, but the best I could find was people suggesting to play the SNES version instead, which isn’t that helpful. Too bad Square didn’t take the Lucasarts remake approach and make the old graphics toggleable.
Not…really? Like, 5 and 6 look like hot garbage, but under the hood they’re still based on the GBA ports which are perfectly serviceable. 4 is based on the DS port which has the weird 3D graphics and totally rebalanced gameplay, but beyond that it’s fine. 7, 8, 9, and the 13 games are all fine, and 3 is garbage no matter which version you play. I have never once heard anyone say the music was fucked up, or any other technical complaint outside of issues that the games had long before porting (13-2 having framerate drops in large open areas, etc).
I remember FF13 in particular having some resolution troubles reminiscent of Dark Souls 1’s release, which ended up getting an unofficial fix courtesy of the same guy who did DSFix for Dark Souls. It might have gotten officially fixed at some point, but I never bought it on PC because FF13 killed all my enthusiasm for anything made past FF12.
The ports of 5 and 6 are technically based on the GBA version, but I think they’re essentially ported from the Android/iOS versions, which themselves were based on the GBA port, so you get the interfaces meant for touchscreens and graphics that were probably less egregious on phone screens.
I know for 5’s mobile (and presumable PC) ports they changed a bunch of stuff that had managed to remain unfixed for 5 releases/20 years. Mostly good changes (Geomancers are now sometimes useful, Berserker targetting), some bug fixes (Sword Slap actually works as intended, and Power Drink finally does something). Sadly they also fixed !Tame, which was supposed to work only Magical Creatures but instead worked on everything but Magical Creatures.
My main issue I have with the 7-9 remasters is that they can’t really redo backgrounds so they look like hot garbage.
Hopefully we’ll get Dragon Quests PC ports now that they’ve finished porting all the Final Fantasies on PSX SNES PS2 oh right they’re porting original mobile games now cool
Might be a day where I get the Final Fantasy games on Steam (despite still having most of the PSX releases of them). At the very least, I want to get 9 for being in my top 3. It used to be at the top, but…well.
For me, order right now is XV in first, XIV in second and IX in third. It was first for me for a long time, because it sold me in it’s writing, the theatrical theme of it just seemed to resonate with me, and it captured that fantasy world that I was always thinking of when I considered a game about fantasy, something VII and VIII never really captured (I was always more for a medieval-esque fantasy, so it fit in more snugly to my ideal). Not that they were bad. Hell, 7 was my first experience of Final Fantasy (British, go figure), and the series drew me in from there after that (though they bought the coffin with X-2 I felt, and nearly buried it with XIII’s mess).
But the setting of XIV is just so immersive and breathtaking at times that I find myself lost in it more often than I should find myself lost in any place at any one time. Add in the ability to switch jobs at the drop of a hat (neutering the need for alternate characters but I still end up making more anyway) and just the amount of things you can do in it and it really kept me attached for quite some time. Sadly, finances forced me to drop the sub, but I still hope to get back into it again in the future (maybe once Stormblood hits).
And XV. Boy Band Roadtrip Simulator (soon to be Power Rangers Roadtrip Simulator) has just captivated me into another world with writing, acting and gameplay that, honestly, I would never have expected after the mess that was the origins of how it came to even exist (remember XIII Versus was a thing? And how FFXIII is almost universally hated as a series?) I just hope that it continues on a trend of good Final Fantasy games in the future.
And I guess, since the mobile stuff came up, I want to give thanks to Record Keeper for giving me a nostalgic kick through all the FF games I either want to play but can’t (busted PS2, faulty PSX discs) or can’t tolerate enough to play the actual games for (looking at you, XIII…and sadly IV because the PSX design of “select once to move spell, select twice to use, and also ATB because we hate you” drove me 100% away from that game).
Edit: Almost forgot to mention FFV is 4th because job system and FOUR JOB FIESTA BABY!
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Nier Automata actually made me re-evaluate my opinion on FFXV a little because it’s pretty much what XV should have been like. I still had a lot of fun.
FFV is a fantastic shout though. The first time I cleared it was Four Job Fiesta and it was an actual blast.
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Combat in XV is simultaneously too slow and too fast at the same time. Parry timings are so screwy that you can’t hit them in time or move cancel out into one. And that in turn makes combat go on forever.