(no subject)

[kjorteo]

God, I'm actually feeling somewhat nostalgic for Final Fantasy VII. You know, the one with Cloud and Sephiroth. Nostalgic as in, "I really want to play through this game again for old time's sake." (MAYBE I WILL.) Also, that game is twelve years old and they have made five more proper Final Fantasy games (not counting spinoffs) since then.

At the time, I was mad at FF7 for being such a radical new departure from what I considered to be the norm and the gold standard (and, admittedly, still my favorite FF even today,) FF6. Maybe it just took the utter abominations that were 8, 9, and 10 for me to realize how good 7 was in retrospect. Or maybe Final Fantasy VII is twelve years old now, how the hell did that happen? D:

I remember how mad I was at the time, because the PSX itself was such a new departure from the in-game cartridge saves of the SNES that we weren't aware that there was a such thing as memory cards or that you needed them, and I had to replay the first hour or so (the opening Mako reactor bit, mostly) and just fantasize about how cool it would be if I could actually save my progress and be able to see what happens next for almost a week after getting that game but before we were able to get a memory card. Now, all the sudden, I realize that that's the sort of thing I would say when reminiscing about old games and consoles on videogame_tales. Because FF7 is an old game for an old console.

Damn.

Comments

[davidn]

Nothing wrong with liking FF7 - the claims of it being overrated have been loud enough for some time that I think it's gone all the way back to being underrated again. I completed it when... I must have been sixteen or so, but I remember very little about it somehow. My memory of it makes it somehow seem bigger than the other FF games, with fairly giant optional sections and a massive amount of minigames, but I'm not sure how well that memory lines up with reality. I do remember it seeming very daunting in size, at least, the way that you didn't even get to the world map for about eight hours - but games that were playable through in more than a couple of hours were quite new to me then.

I'm absolutely going to have to put together an "In defence of FF[8, 9, 10]" post at some point. I don't know if this is because the games had no legacy to me - they might as well have gone with the same renumbering they did for America and called those FF2, 3 and 4 (and it would have been gloriously confusing if they had) - but I enjoyed each of them at the time. FF8 is the most difficult because I can now see its nonsensical storyline and dialogue, detestability of the main character (which I genuinely didn't notice at all when I was under his age) and the enormous abusability of the junction system - but this was all new to me at the time!

FF9 was weird. And I don't know why - there's just something inexplicable about it that feels different from the rest of them to me, just in the general style. Its biggest flaw was the battle system, which was hopelessly slow. And I insist that FF10 had a wonderful visual levelling system that transformed relatively meaningless increases into continual rewards like so many carrots on sticks - hampered recognizably by being the worst-acted game in the world* and making you play as a complete dipstick.

However, it's telling that after all those concessions, I can't actually think of one that I have to give FF6 (which I still haven't completed). This might be mostly Woolsey's work, but it had a sense of humour about itself, even if it had the most awful Bowdlerization in the world - changing "Everyone's dead" to "Jump off the cliff, that should cheer you up :D". I wonder why I didn't notice that at the time.

* Apart from Night Trap

[kjorteo]

I actually liked what they did to FF6 when they turned it into US FF3. The Woolseyized dialogue is charming, memorable, and all-around fantastic (Son of a submariner!!) and I'd much rather have that than the emo-fest that the later FFs had a tendency to delve into. Even the nonsensical changes like enemy names, where it really didn't add anything important to the game to change its name but doing so made it contradict later FF terminology--like changing Tonberries into Pugs, for example--is something I will defend perhaps more zealously than I should, possibly due to nostalgia. Because I played it so much at the time, they will always be Pugs to me. :( And I still, still, even after fifteen years and six or seven more games since then to get used to it, hate the -a -aga -aja system of naming increasingly powerful spells. In FF6, it was Fire, Fire 2, Fire 3, and Fire 4, and that was good enough for me! (The spells also had a bit of Bowdlerization when they changed Death to Doom and Holy to Pearl, admittedly, but I file that under "I inexplicably prefer that just because that's what I had and am used to" alongside the Pugs.)

Because of all of this, I'm actually very hesitant to play the remakes. On top of more legitimate issues (such as FF6 GBA's sound being awful compared to the original,) correcting all that just seems...I don't know. Like they turned FF6 into a Final Fantasy game. :(

[kjorteo]

Also, I think the problem with FF7 is that Square has turned not just FF in general, but FF7 in particular into a franchise, with Advent Children and all the other horrible knockoffs that continue in directions absolutely no one wanted them to go, blatantly revive characters who very much died just because they were popular, and somehow manage to make the cast even more emo. It's hard to separate Final Fantasy VII--that game that came out twelve years ago and was revolutionary at the time, but the graphics are a little blocky and the translation is somewhat dodgy in hindsight--from its own legacy. At the very least, if do I replay it, I'm going to have a hard time getting to the part where you recruit Vincent without thinking "oh hey, you're that whiny emo bitch of Squall Leonheart-esque proportions from Dirge of Cerberus."

It might be slightly easier if I try to play it with self-induced discontinuity--FF7, at the time, was meant to be a self-contained story just like all the other FFs, and therefore anything that's not part of FF7 itself doesn't exist.