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[gimymblert]

I bought ff7 

[JWK5]

I bought ff7 

I am more partial to the first 6, but 7 is pretty awesome. Have you played through it before?

[ProgramGamer]

Why would you pay for FF7? Just watch someone play it on Youtube like everyone.

[gimymblert]

I watch people playing it (friend, family), so I'm familiar, I just didn't have a psx, I did play some sequences.

However I think from a structural point, FF7 have the most solid overall story structure of all modern FF. It's literally 3 factions (avalanche, shinra, jenova familia) that are driven by increasing revelation to the player but also characters, it's cliche and whatever is stretched is still plausible as in universe things. It allow for fluff and side story to breath on this solid structure. Plot twist is very organic due to the nature of the structure and flows well.

FF8 is where weird stretch happen (ultimecia motive to compress time to a single movement)but that still hold up in a weird poetic way. The story is more straightforward and only rendered convoluted by deus ex machina (convenient amnesia that isn't very plot driven unlike cloud's trauma) and plot trick rather than twist. Basically the game is sold on huge misdirection that weaken the overall plot (edea) as there is only two true factions (edea being brainwashed by ultimecia).

FF9 was kind of bad for me, it has always appear to me that the character didn't slot very well in their function, the queen was mad for no good reason, I never really get kuja's motive and the whole genome things felt like forced plot twist despite the forewarning (mist) that was kind of just there and not really the main struggle the story focused on anyway, so the whole gaia terra didn't hit me at all and feel like unncessary, ther strong point is the cliche plot about grenat and the rest feel like mandatory FF style settings to check the boxes.

FFX was great in theme and settings, but god that pacing and lack of stake in the plot despite having great stake in the world (sin), It felt like wasted possibility and they used up slot with a huge filler like seymour who had zero purpose but to stop the progression uncessarily, it doesn't even affect in an interesting way character arcs, just a huge diversion because we need a check box human villain, but Yunalesca was better to fill that slot but ended just a minor note. I think they could have better integrated the Fayth's dream and Yuyevon's arc but it was basically just a very distant backdrop until the end of the game and use as one note muted twist.

FFXI is irrelevant as it is MMO

ffXII tries the greek tragedy angle, with human being played by gods, a gods going prometheus and the main character acting as fate. Basically the villain were tragic figures who wanted to do something good and end up succedding despite them instead of because of them. The game is set in motion by the initial act of invasion and destitution of "ashe" which then spen dthe whole story trying to come back, but the twist really has nothing to do with her and while she end up being instrumental in the story, the whole journey was basically a huge diversion and aimless wandering chasing things that didn't really matter in the end while the actual plot happen in the background.

F13 GODDAMN! The plot can be summurize as damn if you do, dman if you don't. All character in the game, villain and hero are bound by an enforced fate which goes in contradiction with their aspiration, heroes want to save coccoon but must bring ragnarok aka ending it, and they have a count down that will only end in tragedy, aka become a monster, see loved one become monster or dieing, or became eternally a crystal, baddies want to destroy coccoon because they want to see daddy maker again and free themselves from their programming, hence cursing the heroes. That's complex to pull off and way above what square can pull off in writing, the result is all character spending their time being confused and shaking their head just like the player and of course the only way to solve the plot is deus ex machina, yay! GODDAMN!

ff14 mmo again

[s0]

However I think from a structural point, FF7 have the most solid overall story structure of all modern FF. It's literally 3 factions (avalanche, shinra, jenova familia) that are driven by increasing revelation to the player but also characters, it's cliche and whatever is stretched is still plausible as in universe things. It allow for fluff and side story to breath on this solid structure. Plot twist is very organic due to the nature of the structure and flows well.

yeah. the story is (iirc) structured rather similarly to ff6 tho. i guess one nice thing about ff7 is that the characters all have secrets that are actually interesting to find out.

the only thing holding it back is bad writing. or bad translation work at any rate. the german translation is a complete trainwreck, it's actually translated from the already bad english translation (rather than the original japanese) and probably done by a cheap hired translator who hadn't even seen the game. they were actually so sloppy that they accidentally left some lines of english dialog in there.

this was like the tail end of the era when awful translations were still acceptable in videogames. something like this happening in a modern AAA game would be unimaginable lol.

FF9 was kind of bad for me, it has always appear to me that the character didn't slot very well in their function, the queen was mad for no good reason, I never really get kuja's motive and the whole genome things felt like forced plot twist despite the forewarning (mist) that was kind of just there and not really the main struggle the story focused on anyway, so the whole gaia terra didn't hit me at all and feel like unncessary, ther strong point is the cliche plot about grenat and the rest feel like mandatory FF style settings to check the boxes.

i loved FF9 when i was 11, it's a good kids story.  the characters don't have believeable motivations but they have exaggerated cartoony personalities, that's what matters. it also has the most fun location and enemy designs of the main series FFs (IN MY OPINION, but im biased because it was my first rpg outside of pokemon).

[gimymblert]

For sure if you ignore writing and structure, FF works like dream and have kid logic, they also tend to have great character design (overall not just visual) that transcend inconsistance. I was mostly criticising the structure and why FF7 is still the most impactful, the good add up over times, and it also have the right kind of weirdness inside a non collapsing structure to hold them as great diversion (mgs too have a great backbone that make the bizarre moment shine)

 IMO it has a stronger structure than game like mass effect which is basically ff8 (misdirection villains manipulated by big baddies that want to end it all and plot complication to pace things up).

FF are great hallucination, like hallucination they have great vivid visual and weird stuff happening, that makes them memorable, but true impact is achieve when minimal substance support the hallucination.

In my current game (and future), I spend so much time establishing structure even though the world can be seen as hodgepodge of ideas ...

[s0]

i hated ff8. it almost felt like a parody of ff7 to me (triple triad is nice tho).

[gimymblert]

The great things with FF7 is that it's complex plot work because of the great unifying stake "the planet is dieing", avalanche (the hero) want to stop the planet dieing and the planet dies because shinra over consumme her lifestream. Shinra themselves thinks they are doing great stuff exploiting the lifestream (making great technological progress) while being blind by power greed. Shinra want to find aerith because she is a cintra (an ancient race in tunes with the planet), which mean she know the path to the source of lifestream, hence more power. Being a cintra aerith don't want the planet dieing hence she is part of avalanche. In their search for power they found jenova's remain they mistook for a cintra and make experience on her to assess the power of the cintra on lifestream. Sephiroth is the result of experience with jenova and became mad by understanding the truth, hence why he fight against shinra. Jenova was an alien from space the cintra fight and killed in a pyrrhic battle that annihilated them, making aerith the last of them. etc ... it's web that is intricate ut fold back to the main assumption and build on it, metal gear work in a similar way, and so is soap and romance story, which seems like the basic for complex good story (in an entertainment way) lol At least 3 factions, some misunderstanding, shake vigourously

@silber
ff8 is very different from ff7 IMHO, it's a love story with typical epic jrpg in the background and botched geopolitics (the invasion plot really goes nowhere) and lot of unnecessary filler (ellon's vision is great and all but it's just there to slow down the revelation with everyone knowing themselves and introducing ultimecia by yet another foil) that still has more story function that fucking seymour (damn it seymour, the trailer tease a love triangle that pit you against tidus, and damn it it could have geopolitic repercution and diplomacy and something about duty (strong theme with yuna), NOPE NOPE RENOPE   ). I mean the whole ultimecia thing is a clear backsit from Rinoa and squall closing together clumsyly.

[gimymblert]

ff8 have clumsy love glorious scene such as

[gimymblert]

Also cloud is way more less emo than people are making it in the end, while squall is the original FF brooding hero, cloud only became truly emo after the twist where his false memory are reveal (the death of zack), an honest trauma, I mean they guys readily accepted to dress as woman, and there was many funny scene with him, give him credit!

[Alevice]

yeah he was the vegeta first, i was surprised when people kept putting cloud as emo. squall was horrid

[JWK5]

I like how FF6 is built up of overlapping layers of global conflict and intertwining threads of personal conflict that all literally lead to world destruction... and the the second half of the game starts (and you must regroup from the cataclysm to mount one final attack).

In the first half of the game you are meeting and getting to know characters in the context of war, in the second half (with everyone separated) you are meeting them and getting reacquainted in the context of their own personal turmoil where they express their own vulnerability (to the backdrop of a world that has gone to ruin).

Especially in terms of console RPGs of the time, it was some pretty impressive storytelling.

[gimymblert]

Chrono trigger win

[ThemsAllTook]

squall was horrid

I actually identified with Squall quite a lot when I first played FF8, but that's probably because I was a brooding teenager at the time.

[Nillo]

I've been spending time with Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan over the last couple weeks. I had only played the first game of the series before and this is a considerable improvement. I would say it's better than EO1 in every way, especially the skill design and mapping features. In the first game there were many useless skills and some seriously flawed classes (Ronin). Here it feels much more balanced and I see a lot of viable team combinations. My favorite addition to the map is the autopilot button. You can place arrows to define a route and then just press that button to have your party move through the dungeon automatically, making it a breeze to travel back down to where you were.

I was worried that it was going to be an easier game than the original but so far it appears that this is not the case. The difficulty remains quite high and that makes it enjoyable to me. I really enjoy the concept of FOEs in general because if you're confident you can "sequence break" the game by killing a FOE earlier than intended. I think more games should have optional difficulty spikes like this.

[ThemsAllTook]

Just beat Crypt of the NecroDancer with Aria for the first time since early access. The final boss is really something special. (I mean that in a good way, of course. Whole game is a masterpiece.)

[oahda]

Played a bunch of stuff the other day. Old and new(er) stuff on a PS3.

Some original Rayman. Difficult.

Demo of pretentious indie game called The unfinished swan. I liked it. Really cool aesthetics (tho when the shadows get added it looks a bit like a default Unity project, but the first completely black and white section is gorgeous). Only problem was that there was no explanation in the beginning and it took me a while to realise that it was a first person game with a crosshair(s??) in the middle; I thought it was top down to begin with and that the crosshair(s??) was the character and it was super confusing.

Journey! Finally got to play it after all these years. It was nothing like I had expected. I thought it was like this 2D indie game (I'd only ever really seen that pic in Indie game: the movie and it looked like a 2D character standing in a parallax 2D desert to me), but apparently there had been some big, big studio involved with the game as well and it was super stylistic, amazing, stylised 3D?? Played one journey offline (people say online adds to the experience but I really don't see that working for me – I felt a lot more excited about going into the world completely alone, because that's how I prefer my games, and I don't like online stuff in general). Another game without explanation of anything really. Makes me feel more secure about having little introduction to my own games. Liked it a lot anyhow. Incredibly beautiful.

Then from that to....... SONIC AND KNUCKLES 2!!! I think. Wow. Awful in every way. We laughed a lot tho.

[Antrus]

Planet Explorers

[Impmaster]

Princessa, the online in Journey was supposed to be famous because it enhanced the game by making a journey with another person actually beautiful. There's no communication, save a whistle (? havent actually played the game, my mem is shaky), so it's like having an AI, more than some nerd in his basement.

[Alevice]

The final part had a touching moment with people playing online.