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Best Final Fantasy
in Video Games
If I am only to play one final fantasy or similar game. Which one should it be?
Comments
/Troll answer
Second choice would be IV
Semi-related, for SRPGs or TRPGs or whatever Final Fantasy Tactics clones are called these days, Disgaea. Mostly because it's trivially easy to make extremely broken, overpowered characters with the right combination of grinding, planning and being effing unemployed. NIS basically said "if you want to waste time grinding, then go nuts because grinding is all we got. Have a level cap of 9999 and a port for your DS so you can grind on the go."
Kinda want to make an RPG with almost no grind and some ridiculously amazing skin.
Quick Breakdown (I'm not using roman numerals anymore because screw that):
-1, 4, and to a lesser extend 6 and 9 use more of the traditional JRPG systems of leveling up and managing equipment and magic. 1 didn't really age well, and 9 is really best appreciated once you already know the Final Fantasy tropes. As Rym said, 4 and 6 are your best bets.
-2 had a weird Saga Frontier style leveling system, where you gained stats based on how often you performed actions associated with those stats in battle. It was kind of cumbersome, and I don't remember the plot being much to write home about.
-3 and 5 used the Job System, much like FF Tactics. It's interesting enough once you get used to it, and I know people who swear by FF5.
-7 and 8 tried some new things with magic and skills, and they only kind of succeeded. They are functional enough for what they are, but if you've played 4, 5, or 6, then it's going to be underwhelming. Plus the plots are overly convoluted and unnecessarily confusing.
-10 is pretty serviceable, I really liked the sphere grid system. It's probably my favorite of the 'modern' FF games. But good god that voice acting. Good god.
-11 and 14 are MMOs, so they are right out.
-12 and 13 went in very different directions as far as battle systems go, and in some ways are barely recognizable as Final Fantasy games. 12 actually can be helpful to learn basic programming logic, as you set up your party to automatically react to events and actions in battle. 13 for a lot of it is barely a game and more of an interactive story where you take breaks to push buttons (even moreso than the others). And really MOST of the battle system in it is automated, and you do most of your work before battles begin, planning out your layouts. So these two games are thematically and tonally similar to the other games, but functionally are not so much. (Which might be fine if you aren't used to the previous games already).
I'm sure much of the above is contentious, and everyone has opinions that have been causing internet arguments for decades. But I wanted to at least try and break them down a bit; others will likely correct and add information about these anyway.
Long story short, play 6.
Why does it seem like the JRPG genre has decreased in popularity so much? Final Fantasy 15 is coming out later this month and not that many people seem to care any more. On the other hand, Bioware releases a trailer for the new Mass Effect Andromeda game and everyone is super excited.
Is it because JRPGs have failed to adapt to changing technology and play styles of modern games? Is it because gamers' opinions have changed? Is it because of the rise of good quality Western RPGs? Is it because the average JRPG player is older and can't/doesn't want to devote hours and hours into grinding? But if that's the case, why will I happily play Mass Effect for 50+ hours, but won't do the same with a JRPG?
I'm honestly curious. The PS1/PS2 era seems to have been the hay-day of JRPGs, and since then, the genre seems to have been in a steady decline.
Modern games have far more sophisticated addiction loops.
Games like IV, VI, Chrono Trigger, etc. have stories and characters that are on the level of an all-time great fantasy anime or manga. If you just took FFVI and made a direct and accurate adaptation to a TV series or movie, it would be holy shit crazy good. Imagine how badass the ghost train and river poisoning episodes would be!
The newer ones are... uninspiring incomprehensible crap. You can't motivate someone to sit through a grind of random encounters to be rewarded with a boy band pushing a car through the desert.
Let's take a look at the credits, shall we?
All of the director(s) of Chrono Trigger and FFVI all still work for Squeenix.
The artists Akira Toriyama and Yoshitaka Amano are huge, but those games would still be legendary without them. Right? Plenty of other JRPGs without such legendary artists were still terrific. Or am I wrong? Do you need to hire the creator of Dragonball to make your JRPG good? Would Chrono Trigger suck if the art was slightly less good, but everything else was the same?
Nobuo Uematsu - He's not doing the music anymore. I think this is actually huge. The music is a lot of what made those old games so fantastic. With a sub-par soundtrack, those games are falling out of the S-rank of legendary status down to the A rank, at best. Not even Mega Man 2 or Super Metroid would be able to hold legendary status if their music was less good.
The creator of Dragonquest still works at Squeenix and still works on Dragonquest, although they have contributed to other games as well.
Sakaguchi, producer of FFVI and, no longer works for Squeenix. He left in 2004 to make games on his own. Is his departure the reason RPGs have sunk so low? Was his contribution really what made these games so great?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hironobu_Sakaguchi
Nope. He was executive producer of many non-great games. Games he has made on his own are not incredible either. If he was the source of JRPG goodness, his well is dry no matter where he works.
I blame technology. The JRPG exists as a genre because of the technological limitations of the consoles of the '80s and '90s. There were plenty of RPGs made in the USA and UK, but they were for PC. Those PCs were way more powerful than consoles, and thus the games were completely different. Instead of Chrono Trigger you got Old Scrolls, Ultima, all that garbage.
Once the consoles got more horsepower, they made FFVII. The introduction of 3d graphics wasn't a problem. just a visual style difference. The increased size of the game, spanning multiple CD-ROMs was actually great. The music was even better sounding, thanks to those CD-ROMs. But this was still the beginning of the end for the console JRPG.
Why? What was it? What is the villain that killed the genre? Those very same CD-ROMS and increase in tech also allowed one more thing to set foot in the door.
THE CUTSCENE
/thread
But lots of other games both in the RPG genre and out of it use cutscenes. Why are JRPGs different?
Additionally, it was not possible to make something on the scale of a Baldur's Gate on a console back in the day, or if you could, how would you control it? Even though some games have solved that issue It wasn't until recently that anyone started to achieve that feat. It might have just been too difficult to invest in that type of thing. In the golden age of JRPGs I think most people who were looking for something like that only had access to what was available on the console. Now you can play Skyrim on Xbox and PS4 and whatnot.
At least that's my take on it.
EDIT: also I still think the music in modern JRPGs is still pretty decent, I tend not to care for the excessively detailed models they use now, and to a decent extent I think most VO for JRPGs is straight up garbage. And again, the mechanical systems of these games tend to have not changed much or at all for a large majority of these games, they're just kinda stale now.
Also beyond a couple shining examples I think there is always a bit of member berries going on with JRPGs.
It's easier to relate to a pixellated frog with a sword that has funny dialog you read than it is to relate to a fancy 3D frog with a sword that looks scary and has awful voice acting and animation.