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Didn't they already do an HD version and then release it on Steam or something?

Yeah but that basically just means the lines are smoother. I mean a full remake/remastering of the game, with updated graphics, maybe some new content, new animations and effects. Honestly. They can't lose money on it.

Only if they include that fabled method of getting Aeris back. I missed her as an addition to the party, both in terms of gameplay and the fact that she was probably the most likable member..

Well I do hate killing people off just to bring them back later (damn comics). When someone dies they stay dead in my book unless there's a damn good justification for them coming back And Aeris' death especially was so powerful, more so for the generation that played the game on release as for many of them it was the first time a character they loved was killed.

I still never saw the big thing about FF7 myself, I mean it was neat and all but it didn't overtake the former FF6 in glory.

Hey man, they should remake them all and give them the full treatment

Again, how the hell are they going to lose money? FFXIII was dreadful and they still turned a hefty profit

 LordofHats wrote:
Well I do hate killing people off just to bring them back later (damn comics). When someone dies they stay dead in my book unless there's a damn good justification for them coming back And Aeris' death especially was so powerful, more so for the generation that played the game on release as for many of them it was the first time a character they loved was killed.

Colonel Blake.

(no, I odn't have grey hairs :( stop asking!)

 LordofHats wrote:
Well I do hate killing people off just to bring them back later (damn comics). When someone dies they stay dead in my book unless there's a damn good justification for them coming back And Aeris' death especially was so powerful, more so for the generation that played the game on release as for many of them it was the first time a character they loved was killed.

I always had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I have at least 4 ways of bringing people back to life, even after Sepiroth pulls a planet out of space to drop on characters, and none of my characters would even bother to TRY a phoenix down after she gets stabbed with a SWORD.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I mean, at least in FFIV, they TRIED cure magic on that one character.

I just loathe comic book death. Take for example the recent Star Trek film. As the end was playing out, I was excited not just because to me, they'd recaptured the power of Spock's death in WoK, but managed to play it out in a completely different way. I was excited because I was thinking "what will happen now? Star Trek without Kirk? Holy gak this could be awesome!" Then they pulled what has to be one of the most bs Chekov's Guns in the history of film and all the power of that death just got sucked out of the room.

Same reason Search for Spock sucked, same reason I knew Bruce Wayne dying was gonna suck, same reason death just feels like a gimmick to often in stories where a writer(s) is just to damned lazy or uncreative to think of how the story will progress if the character just stays dead (or to keep things interesting without killing someone off just to bring them back later). It's lazy writing. Made worse by how cliche it is (this may well be my most hated cliche).

Tellah was the one who hit me hard. FFIV was very enjoyable. I love redemption stories.

If they remade FFIV and FFIV with hi-res sprites, I would be all over it.

 AdeptSister wrote:
Tellah was the one who hit me hard. FFIV was very enjoyable. I love redemption stories.

If they remade FFIV and FFIV with hi-res sprites, I would be all over it.

IV was one of my favorites too, maybe even more than V.

Also, it's not sprite based but:




On steam now.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
I still never saw the big thing about FF7 myself, I mean it was neat and all but it didn't overtake the former FF6 in glory.

It's what busted the JRPG into the mainstream. For many it was their first Final Fantasy if not just their first RPG period. It also happened far enough back that it was at a point in gaming history where for the most part, RPGs were still the only class of games really focusing on storytelling to any great degree. Put all together it means that FF7 was something of a revolutionary gaming experience for a lot of people.

That said I'll agree it was pretty middle of the pack in the series. Tactics aside, I'd probably say 9 was the best the brand has ever been, with 6 close behind. 1,4 and 12 probably round up my top 5 for the series. I'd really say so far only 13 and 2 have really been big flops for me, of the ones I've played. Which is pretty much all of them excluding the MMOs and direct sequels.

As far as RPGs go, the Lufia series was still better, as was the Chrono series Both of which I still enjoy to this day, admittedly, only the 2d ones, not relaly Chrono Cross. 3d games really show their age.

Still, FF7 was fun at the time at least.

Wait, there was more than Chrono Trigger?

One good FF game I have played was FFIV on the DS. That's pretty good.

 daedalus wrote:
Wait, there was more than Chrono Trigger?

Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers, Chrono Cross, all part of the same canon.

This should be called Bro-Fantasy XV: Popped Collars and jelled hair.

I can't deny that the game looks amazing, then again, all of the FF's do for their time. But that's where I'm finding the awesomeness of the game stays, especially when you look at XIII

I've never completed a FF game. Got about 3/4ths of the way through Final Fantasy 3 on the Game Boy DS, got about an hour into Crisis Core and an hour into FF13.

Wish I'd finished FF3 though... that was actually a pretty legit game.

 Melissia wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
Wait, there was more than Chrono Trigger?

Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers, Chrono Cross, all part of the same canon.

I'm going to look up Radical Dreamers now. As far as I'm concerned, Chrono Cross never happened.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
I've never completed a FF game. Got about 3/4ths of the way through Final Fantasy 3 on the Game Boy DS, got about an hour into Crisis Core and an hour into FF13.

Wish I'd finished FF3 though... that was actually a pretty legit game.

Surprisingly I was a pretty big fan of FF12, decent story...almost reminiscent of Star Wars in an oblique way.

 Melissia wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Well I do hate killing people off just to bring them back later (damn comics). When someone dies they stay dead in my book unless there's a damn good justification for them coming back And Aeris' death especially was so powerful, more so for the generation that played the game on release as for many of them it was the first time a character they loved was killed.

Colonel Blake.

Colonel Blake to this day still makes me mad. Potter was good but Henry was so much better

I'll echo the sentiment that while it looks good not a single FF game after 9 has really grabbed my attention. The newer formula just isn't fun for me.

 Frankenberry wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
I've never completed a FF game. Got about 3/4ths of the way through Final Fantasy 3 on the Game Boy DS, got about an hour into Crisis Core and an hour into FF13.

Wish I'd finished FF3 though... that was actually a pretty legit game.

Surprisingly I was a pretty big fan of FF12, decent story...almost reminiscent of Star Wars in an oblique way.

FF12 was just a few glaring flaws away from being my favorite FF. They did a great job with world building in it. After playing through the game I felt like I had a very good sense of Ivalice as a place and it was a cool setting. I came away feeling like I could pretty easily run pen and paper RPG set in that universe without feeling like I needed to do a ton of gap-filling.

Outside of a couple of a few character designs I loved the style of the universe visually. The localization was spot-on, I loved the overwritten dialogue that does an excellent job staying on the right die of the theatrical/hammy vs cringe-inducing line. The villains all had understandable, sane objectives and were acting in fairly sensible way to achieve them.I also think it had hands-down the best ending of any FF game.

I think where it falls down most is the battle department. Not so much for the only controlling one party member (this works fine in lots of games), but that whole thing is clumsily executed. It controls poorly and the AI-system shouldn't have been on unlocks.

I think it also suffers from defying expectations at bit. It has no romantic sub-plot, where these figured centrally in 10,9,8 and 7. Which is what most of its potential audience learned the series on. The game is told from the perspective of an observer, rather than full participant in the events at hand. The story also has a smaller scope, dealing with 2 nations rather than a whole world. At the same time it's got this focus on politics and cosmology that are a bit bigger than the usual personal struggles in the series.

I could go on a long-thought-about rant on this, but I suppose this is a good place to post this thought.

I used to love the FF series but it has been on a steady decay in terms of gameplay and story for far longer than we have ever considered. I would argue that the place where the decay began was in my favorite (and imo best) game of the series:

Final Fantasy 6 (or 3 for the US players) on SNES.

As much as I love this game, and trust me I do, I believe it is right here where FF's problems started. Not in the story, but in the gameplay, and I think I can explain how problems created by the gameplay eventually caused problems in the story. They are not as separate and divorced as people think, but let's start with what I think is the fraying of FF in FF6. It all boils down to one word: Magicite. The addition of Magicite and the whole concept of any character being able to get access to nearly everything is the poison in Final Fantasy's well.

First, it destroyed challenge. After FF6, there was never a legitimately difficult Final Fantasy game, period. The "extreme hidden bosses" in some games are not challenging, they are tedious at best. FFX is the worst offender in that category, where the idea of challenge is simply replaced with an absurdly deep hp pool for a boss. Likewise, those hidden bosses in 7 and 8 are meh because this point, the whole challenge curve of the game is gone. Magicite started a trend where it was not about "who is the best party for this encounter" or "what is the best strategy for this boss". Instead, it was "how can I get the most super spells". All other character skills became useless once magic became widely available (maybe with one or two exceptions, but still). Let's be honest, who ever used Sketch, SwdTech, etc in the final parts of the game? Nobody did. They were clearly inferior attacks compared to magic. So the challenge curve of the game died, and Square never thought to repair that, so future games became unpalatably easy from here on out.

But how did that impact the story? It removed the gameplay value of your characters and removed the weight they might have had. Now that every character could, essentially, be any other character (a trend that more or less never changed since FF6), changes in your characters meant nothing. In FF4, when Tellah died, not only did you lose a friend, but now your entire party was in danger because you also lost a powerful ally and mage when you didn't have any. Without this, all the characters became, more or less, skins and asthetic, who could be swapped around without having any impact on the story. By having a story that can adapt to its protagonists changing places at all times, the story itself has to become worse and more simple, because the writers cannot give a complex narrative if they don't know which characters will be there.

" The addition of Magicite and the whole concept of any character being able to get access to nearly everything is the poison in Final Fantasy's well."

... that happened in the game before it.

Every character was capable of playing every class.

Ah, I didn't play V, but it hardly changes the point.

Except it did. In that game, what defined the characters were their personalities, not their classes. Losing Galuf was a big hit not because of his class, but because we honestly liked the guy. That was something that a lot of later games missed.

I didn't care that Tidus died. I was kind of glad, actually. Annoying prick.

Fill me in about V, was it open party swapping ala 6 and beyond?

Nope, it was four characters the whole way through (with one exception mentioned above, whom was replaced).

In that case, it fits fine with my point. The class/job is irrelevant, but the whole idea of a character loss having weight still applies. I can't comment on the personality having not played it, but with the death of a character where you don't have 5-10 backups waiting to go actually has weight and meaning in the story. You as a player are put into a more difficult position and it has more impact because the game was designed for you to get to know this guy and count on him in a fight in whatever role he has.

A death in FF6 and beyond doesn't have that. Since the games are designed in such a way to have any party be available at any time (with a few occasional exceptions for certain scenes), the writers can't count on you getting to know and rely on a character. The game can only say "oh man this character means so much!" but it does nothing to offer support for that if you do nothing with them.

A quick example is Aeris. I wasn't too taken by her personality, so I didn't use her in the active party. So when Sephiroth rammed Ol' Happy down her spine, it didn't matter all that much to me from a gameplay perspective, which reduced the weight of the death to me as a player. Gameplay and story should support one another, not be divorced.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Honestly I just want a sequel to FF9 at this point.

Unfortunately, my understanding is that FFIX was considered something of a disappointment.

Mind you, I don't agree with that assessment, and certainly liked it a lot more than VIII and X. I had to push myself to finish the former, and never did finish the latter. Which, of course, must be why the latter was the first FF game to get a true sequel...

In any event, I'll be surprised if they ever do anything further with IX.



On the topic of VI and it's trouble-making for the series...

Another thing that it did was introduce wide-spread high-tech. Yes, high-tech stuff had appeared in earlier games (the Tower in IV, for instance). But the appearances had been limited, and largely described as remnants of an earlier civilization. In VI, you had an entire civilization (the Empire) that was tech-focused. Then in VII, the traditional fantasy elements were removed entirely, and the only times that they've appeared since then are in IX, XI, and XIV - the latter two being the MMORPG games, of course.

The fact that the in-setting technology got upgraded right around the same time that the series started to go bad has always been rather suspicious to me.