Chatty December: Final Fantasies
Any other Final Fantasies? Which ones have you played, which ones are your favorite, which ones your least favorite, why?
Most of them, actually.
I was aware of Final Fantasy back when the first one came out on the NES. My brother played it a LOT more than I did, but I enjoyed it. (Admittedly, at the time I loved Zelda a lot more, but.)
As a kid/teen my game buying budget was miniscule. So I didn't get FFII when it came out (the US version of FFII). But we did get FFIII - what we now know in the series was actually FFVI, but it was only the third in the series to be released in the US.
FFVI is where my love affair with the whole damn series got started. If you've poked at all at my fics, you're probably well aware that Celes is my favorite. For a very simple reason; I am a female gamer. Games where female characters are ANYTHING but 'the magic user' or 'the damsel in distress' or 'the love interest' (or any combination of the three) just...they just don't happen often, even now, and it was almost unheard of back in the days of the SNES. Where it DID happen it was Lara Croft-ish, which was "hey, you have to watch my ass bounce for hours so how about I be a sexy woman because guys might feel weird watching a boy's ass bounce for several hours".
Celes was just a little chibi pixel box. The SNES didn't have awesome graphics. But boy did she have an awesome story. She'd risen to the rank of Imperial General on her own. She was one of only three magitek knights. And she was the only one whose sense of personal honor was so great that when she saw what the Empire was turning her into, she quit. She walked away. On her own. She faced execution for treason, she was beaten and tortured by what had been her own underlings, and when she joins your group she's quite willing - even so - to face execution with dignity rather than go back. She's accused (falsely) of being a traitor to the Returners/an Imperial spy at least twice and both times she lets her actions speak for themselves.
Oh and she's also got an awesome singing voice. And she is not your opera floozy. And she's the lead motivator in quite a large cast for the second half of the game. The half that happens after Armageddon has happened and everyone else can't think of a reason to go on. While there are members of the cast she clearly does care for, and whose opinions matter to her, they are not her motivation for action and romance is not why she does what she does.
Celes was the female role model I'd been waiting my whole life to see in a game, and she's still very much my favorite in the entirety of the Final Fantasy series.
So, um, yeah. FFVI is my favorite Final Fantasy game.
I've played all of them up to FFX, and I have played FFXIII. I haven't played FFXI, or X-2, or XII, or XIII-2. But I'm on XIV.
Of these...I appreciated FFIV's redemption arc; I think it's the only one where you start out as the bad guy, and actually play a few hours as a bad guy, before you undertake the trial that will let you change sides. And I liked that it wasn't just the protagonist but also Kain; it is, I think, the only game where you can see a reasonably convincing love triangle.
FFVI I've covered, FFVII and VIII I've covered. FFX...guys, I'd love to say I got into it, but honestly I didn't really. It always hit me as too much Pretty, not enough Story.
There's a special place in hell for the designers of FFIX. Of all the games I've played it's my least favorite, and it's my least favorite because of the way it tried to shoehorn cutesy nostalgia into places it truly didn't belong. If you want to pay homage to FFVII, for example...have there be a Cait Sith line of toys, maybe. Or a Gold Saucer arcade. Or a painting of the City of the Ancients. Something that, y'know, stuck out about the game, or the game world. There was no reason to stick Cloud's big damn sword in there. I think FFVIII's homage was a stupid play that honestly wound up highlighting just how badly FFVIII's romance arc had been written in the first place; sometimes parody does have that effect.
Oh and for whatever goddamn reason, the woman character I'd otherwise have been quite inclined to admire was a freaking rooster. What. The. Hell.
I think that to some extent the Final Fantasy games have calmed down, in terms of OH MY GOD THE PRETTY, and started getting back to the story, but I also feel that somehow they've managed to learn the wrong lesson from FFVII and in a sense it's sort of the same lecture I'd want to give Steven Moffatt. DARK DOES NOT EQUAL GOOD STORY.
Okay. Yes. In my favoritest of all the games, armageddon happens right in the middle and you spend the latter half playing in a devastated post-apocalyptic world. But there are lighter notes all through the game. ULTROS, for example, my god ULTROS. The three dream stooges. There's a beautiful moment when you get the Phoenix magicite and Locke and Rachel can have a last moment together. The world is dark but the story includes all these beautiful lighter bits, that can help you believe that yes, your team really would fight to save even a broken shell of a world.
In FFVII that got shifted to 'staving off the apocalypse' - which ultimately failed, leaving the later games in the compilation to play through the post-apocalyptic world, and there are fewer and fewer lighter notes.
FFIX went the other way and made it ALL light notes, to the point where it's like watching the leaders of a clown convention trying to avert the apocalypse.
And then they just went...make the world pretty, but make the story AWFUL. Spira, the dream of the dying, and then ...jeez. Each game just gets darker and darker even as the worlds and costumes get prettier and prettier. By the time I got to FFXIII, I was genuinely wondering why any of the main characters cared enough to keep fighting, they'd been handed crushing blow after crushing blow.
It's gotten to a point where I'm a bit wary of backtracking to get to the games I missed or didn't finish, because yow. I do not need a game to depress me. And while I like pretty, the FF games have started coming off like icing on a moldy cupcake. I'm really hoping SOMEONE in their writing staff learns, or re-learns, how to leaven the tragedy with kinder notes.
Most of them, actually.
I was aware of Final Fantasy back when the first one came out on the NES. My brother played it a LOT more than I did, but I enjoyed it. (Admittedly, at the time I loved Zelda a lot more, but.)
As a kid/teen my game buying budget was miniscule. So I didn't get FFII when it came out (the US version of FFII). But we did get FFIII - what we now know in the series was actually FFVI, but it was only the third in the series to be released in the US.
FFVI is where my love affair with the whole damn series got started. If you've poked at all at my fics, you're probably well aware that Celes is my favorite. For a very simple reason; I am a female gamer. Games where female characters are ANYTHING but 'the magic user' or 'the damsel in distress' or 'the love interest' (or any combination of the three) just...they just don't happen often, even now, and it was almost unheard of back in the days of the SNES. Where it DID happen it was Lara Croft-ish, which was "hey, you have to watch my ass bounce for hours so how about I be a sexy woman because guys might feel weird watching a boy's ass bounce for several hours".
Celes was just a little chibi pixel box. The SNES didn't have awesome graphics. But boy did she have an awesome story. She'd risen to the rank of Imperial General on her own. She was one of only three magitek knights. And she was the only one whose sense of personal honor was so great that when she saw what the Empire was turning her into, she quit. She walked away. On her own. She faced execution for treason, she was beaten and tortured by what had been her own underlings, and when she joins your group she's quite willing - even so - to face execution with dignity rather than go back. She's accused (falsely) of being a traitor to the Returners/an Imperial spy at least twice and both times she lets her actions speak for themselves.
Oh and she's also got an awesome singing voice. And she is not your opera floozy. And she's the lead motivator in quite a large cast for the second half of the game. The half that happens after Armageddon has happened and everyone else can't think of a reason to go on. While there are members of the cast she clearly does care for, and whose opinions matter to her, they are not her motivation for action and romance is not why she does what she does.
Celes was the female role model I'd been waiting my whole life to see in a game, and she's still very much my favorite in the entirety of the Final Fantasy series.
So, um, yeah. FFVI is my favorite Final Fantasy game.
I've played all of them up to FFX, and I have played FFXIII. I haven't played FFXI, or X-2, or XII, or XIII-2. But I'm on XIV.
Of these...I appreciated FFIV's redemption arc; I think it's the only one where you start out as the bad guy, and actually play a few hours as a bad guy, before you undertake the trial that will let you change sides. And I liked that it wasn't just the protagonist but also Kain; it is, I think, the only game where you can see a reasonably convincing love triangle.
FFVI I've covered, FFVII and VIII I've covered. FFX...guys, I'd love to say I got into it, but honestly I didn't really. It always hit me as too much Pretty, not enough Story.
There's a special place in hell for the designers of FFIX. Of all the games I've played it's my least favorite, and it's my least favorite because of the way it tried to shoehorn cutesy nostalgia into places it truly didn't belong. If you want to pay homage to FFVII, for example...have there be a Cait Sith line of toys, maybe. Or a Gold Saucer arcade. Or a painting of the City of the Ancients. Something that, y'know, stuck out about the game, or the game world. There was no reason to stick Cloud's big damn sword in there. I think FFVIII's homage was a stupid play that honestly wound up highlighting just how badly FFVIII's romance arc had been written in the first place; sometimes parody does have that effect.
Oh and for whatever goddamn reason, the woman character I'd otherwise have been quite inclined to admire was a freaking rooster. What. The. Hell.
I think that to some extent the Final Fantasy games have calmed down, in terms of OH MY GOD THE PRETTY, and started getting back to the story, but I also feel that somehow they've managed to learn the wrong lesson from FFVII and in a sense it's sort of the same lecture I'd want to give Steven Moffatt. DARK DOES NOT EQUAL GOOD STORY.
Okay. Yes. In my favoritest of all the games, armageddon happens right in the middle and you spend the latter half playing in a devastated post-apocalyptic world. But there are lighter notes all through the game. ULTROS, for example, my god ULTROS. The three dream stooges. There's a beautiful moment when you get the Phoenix magicite and Locke and Rachel can have a last moment together. The world is dark but the story includes all these beautiful lighter bits, that can help you believe that yes, your team really would fight to save even a broken shell of a world.
In FFVII that got shifted to 'staving off the apocalypse' - which ultimately failed, leaving the later games in the compilation to play through the post-apocalyptic world, and there are fewer and fewer lighter notes.
FFIX went the other way and made it ALL light notes, to the point where it's like watching the leaders of a clown convention trying to avert the apocalypse.
And then they just went...make the world pretty, but make the story AWFUL. Spira, the dream of the dying, and then ...jeez. Each game just gets darker and darker even as the worlds and costumes get prettier and prettier. By the time I got to FFXIII, I was genuinely wondering why any of the main characters cared enough to keep fighting, they'd been handed crushing blow after crushing blow.
It's gotten to a point where I'm a bit wary of backtracking to get to the games I missed or didn't finish, because yow. I do not need a game to depress me. And while I like pretty, the FF games have started coming off like icing on a moldy cupcake. I'm really hoping SOMEONE in their writing staff learns, or re-learns, how to leaven the tragedy with kinder notes.