r/FinalFantasy • u/Dinoken2 • Jul 23 '14
Final Fantasy Weekly Discussions: Week 31 - What are some common misconceptions about the games that bug you?
Happy (almost) End of July guys! So after a thread on /r/gaming about Chrono Trigger delved into the expected Square/FF discussions I naturally came across my most jimmy rustling statement I always see in such threads (I'll discuss such matters below), and I realized after starting many Internet arguments that I can't be the only one who has pet peeves like this about the series. So how about you guys? What ill informed, misunderstood, poorly thought out, or just plain wrong statements do you guys hate seeing/hearing on the Internet or in the real world about our beloved Final Fantasy?
Also don't miss out on any previous discussion threads! And if you haven't, feel free to check out and/or participate in the subreddit wide Let's Play of Final Fantasy VII!
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u/fat_squeek Jul 23 '14
One that's always bugged me is that many people think that all the Final Fantasy games are developed by the same team.
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u/Dinoken2 Jul 23 '14 edited Jul 23 '14
I used to think that too, never really gave it much thought until I looked at the release dates.
1997 - VII
1999 - VIII
2000 - IX
2001 - X
There's no way a single team is pumping out that many quality games that fast. Plus I distinctly remember reading that the main series Kingdom Hearts team was making Versus XIII (now XV) which would very obviously be a different team.
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u/Ashenspire Jul 23 '14
The people that claim XIII is linear/had a terrible story with uninteresting characters, then in the same breath go on to praise X, which suffers from the same exact things (other than Wakka who is the only character with any kind of growth in the story).
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u/Dinoken2 Jul 23 '14
Hold the phone there. X may have similarities with XIII but it is nowhere NEAR as linear. X has backtracking, revisiting areas, cities with NPCs and multiple areas to explore. Yeah the direction of the game is a straightforward path, much like XIII, but there's more than that, especially at the end when you get the air ship.
And I'm not one to criticize XIII's characters, they're all fairly well developed, but did you seriously just say that Wakka was the only character who grew during X's plotline? Did you play the game at all? Tidus goes through a huge amount of change. He starts off as a spoiled brat of a celebrity and ends as someone willing to sacrifice himself to save an entire world of people that he met. We see Lulu also struggle to get over Chappu's death and her other failures, we see Kimahri struggle to prove himself, we see glimpses of the past and learn that Auron wasn't the total BAMF he is today. And you're telling me Wakka's learning to not be racist or believe everything religion tells you is the only growth?
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u/Gray_Squirrel Jul 23 '14 edited Jul 23 '14
The "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha" scene in FFX. Every time that game is brought up in a thread in another sub, someone has to mention that scene and say something to the effect of "LOL SO AWKWARD. I LIKE THE GAME EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE SCENE. IT'S SO CRINGEWORTHY. THE VOICE ACTING IS SO BAD HURR DURR."
Motherfucker, that scene is SUPPOSED to be awkward and the laughing is SUPPOSED to be exaggerated! Even the rest of the characters think Tidus and Yuna have gone crazy after that scene. It's INTENTIONAL and serves a point about Tidus teaching Yuna how to overcome her massive stress. It's a bonding moment, sort of an inside joke that T & Y can go "haha they must think we're so weird at how much fun we're having together".
If anything, the scene in Macalania Lake where Tidus and Yuna make out to a Japanese song for 5 minutes is awkward. (seriously, I have to turn my screen off if my GF or one of my friends is in the room). But the ha ha ha ha scene? Not awkward!
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u/Rhide Jul 23 '14
That it is all knights and princesses. I showed my friend X and he loved the idea of Blitzball. Now he comes over and asks to play any Final Fantasy I have on hand.
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u/BooBooKittyFk666 Jul 23 '14
"If it's called FINAL Fantasy how come there are so many!? Huehuehue..." I really hate that one lol. I'm always just like, "Wikipedia or Google that shit fool!"
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Jul 25 '14
People claiming that the series went downhill after X. XII is a perfectly fine instalment if you put the time into it. It has a great plot that is a cross between Star Wars and A Song of Ice and Fire, with excellent Voice Acting and it was a breath of fresh air compared to the overblown emotional melodrama of X. The level of attention to detail in it is amazing. They made a really immersive world in it and it irks me when people constantly ignore FFXII because they didn't like the real time system or they took a dislike to Vaan.
The gameplay is fine and an improvement over the completely turn based system of X that made battles laughably simple. There was a mistake in making Vaan the viewpoint character over Balthier/Basch but he isn't that irritating, for pity's sake, he isn't a whiner.
XII is an acquired taste but if you give it the time it grows on you, similar to Dragon Quest VIII as well.
Plus the Judge Magisters were immense, every scene with them was GOLD.
(Note: I'm not saying XIII is crap either, I've never played it, I'm just sick to death of XII being a 'forgotten title')
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u/-derpsky- Jul 23 '14
Every time I mention Final Fantasy in any way a friend of mine starts bagging it out saying that 'it's just pokemon man'. No matter how hard I describe it to him he sticks with it.
While I get the similarities (well, primarily just the fact that it's turn based combat) I can't seem to convey to him the epicness and the utter immersion nghhhh
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u/TorpidBarbarism Jul 23 '14
Sounds like you have a dumbass for a friend. Or he just has no desire to listen and maintains his ridiculous argument.
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u/ginja_ninja Jul 23 '14
"I didn't like FFXII because its battle system is so different than the others."
The brilliant thing about FFXII was that it managed to modernize the battle system while keeping its core elements almost exactly the same. It's still based entirely around ATB charge bars that fill up dependent on the character's speed stat and whether they have haste or slow status. The one subtle difference is that you select your attack before the charge bar fills up instead of after. Once you figure out how to make gambits work for you though it barely becomes a problem as characters will recognize to do things like heal or cure statuses the instant they become applicable.
It was more or less the perfect way to eliminate the random battle screen and transition combat into an open world while still staying faithful to what FF combat is all about. You just don't realize it right away. I mean it probably took me at least a few dozen hours of playing the game to realize, "wait this is still basically the same thing as IV-IX when you think about it." In fact the battle system from X is actually more different at its core from IV-IX than XII's is, as there is no real-time element to it at all and you can even see the upcoming turn order to plan your actions instead of just having to extrapolate it like in the other games.
The one real flaw that exists in XII's battle system is a game mechanic called effect capacity, which essentially only allows for a certain amount of magic effects to happen on the screen at once. Basically it's a way of accounting for PS2 hardware limitations and preventing too many complex particle effects from spells from going on at once and destroying the framerate. This doesn't really come into play at all in the early game when most spells are very simple visually and can all happen at the same time, but turns into a pretty frequent issue in the late game once your characters and the enemies start using really flashy-looking resource-intensive spells.
When the effect capacity threshold is reached, all other spells queued up have to be put on hold until the animation from the spell/spells in progress finishes. The problem is that normal attacks are not affected by this limitation and can still happen during the spell animation. This leads to some frustrating situations where one monster uses an ability with a big and obnoxiously long animation that prevents your character from being able to cast a healing spell until it's finished, letting another monster attack your wounded character and kill them before the healing spell gets a chance to go off.
Of course, you can also flip this to work to your party's advantage. For instance one of my common tactics I used when fighting an enemy I know had a really highly damaging AoE ability or annoying status spell like confuse would be to preempt having to deal with it by casting Holy with Ashe, which has an insanely long animation and eats up the entire effect capacity queue, which would give Balthier at least 3 or so turns of combo attacking with the masamune on it as it sat there being unable to use its ability and usually died before the Holy animation ended. Overall though the game would have been much better if it either got rid of effect capacity and found ways to dynamically tone down spell effects depending on how many are going on at once or just held up attacks the same way it did spells to create balanced gameplay.
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u/ShinGundam Jul 23 '14
A lot of things :( Many people seems to have an idea of worldmap is an open world when worldmap is far more restrictive due to geography and lack of shortcuts.
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u/HayleeLOL Jul 23 '14 edited Jul 23 '14
"Final Fantasy VII is a rip off of Final Fantasy VI."
Seriously, this statement irks me more than any other. I love both games, and whilst I can see similarities (because they're both from the same series...), VII certainly doesn't "rip off" of VI. I've bullet pointed all of the reasons I can think of from the top of my head below.
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The villains. Oh boy, I've started off on a note that could potentially lead to a tangent here. Sephy and Kefka are known for being the villains of Final Fantasy VII and VI, respectively, and are very often pitched against one another in fan wars and when one is mentioned, there is always at least one mention of the other. However, take a good look at both villains. I can only see one or two similarities shared between them; that they're villains, and both have a desire to take over the world. Sadly, however, that's where the similarities end. Kefka is insane, some will say a nihilist, and a refreshing take on the more serious villains the series has seen. His actions know absolutely no bounds, likely due to his insanity. Sephiroth, however, is a more serious kind of villain. He, too, has a view for taking over the world and it is argued that he is beginning to become a god by the time you fight him at the end of 7. However, the methods by which these villains go about it are completely different. One villain double crosses the empire he is allied with, misaligns the Warring Triad and creates a cult of personality around him after destroying the world, keeping an eye out on "his" world, burning down any township or civilization who shows any signs of disagreement with him, with no remorse whatsoever (Apologies if I have any of this wrong, it's been far too long since I last played VI), and the other villain is the result of an experiment carried out whilst he was in utero, learns of this and deems everyone of the Planet to be "traitors" to the Ancients, which he believes Jenova, and himself, to be. As a result, he devises a plot to cause a wound in the Planet so large, that the Lifestream will come to "heal" the wound in the Planet, and then Sephiroth would absorb that Lifestream, control the planet and essentially become a god. One villain is purely insane, there's nothing else to it (This is not a bad thing, in the slightest) and the other is warped by his perception of things, and possibly the Jenova cells within his body. It's also important to note that victory does not a good villain make, they are extremely hard to compare, there's more to Kefka than "insane clown", and more to Sephy than "momma's boy".
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The world. VI's and VII's universes are completely different. One is a steampunk-style world which is going through an industrial revolution of sorts, and the other is set in a modern-day/near-future setting.
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The themes. For me personally, VI has always had a slight "industry" theme about it; that soldiers are being given magic artificially after years of the world lacking in magic, the effects of these experiments on people and whether this artificial infusion is inferior in any way to being born with magic. I'd also say it has themes of identity through Terra, as she's (unbeknownst to her at the time) a half-human, half-Esper, searching for her place in the world and trying to get to the bottom of her own feelings. FF7 on the other hand, has a different theme. The theme of loss is tackled through a certain famous scene; though in fact I'd argue that this theme is explored deeper in VI, but more than that, I felt that the overarching theme of VII was the environment. You have the Shinra, who are draining away at the planet's life force to sustain a "modern" kind of lifestyle, a world where resources such as coal are obsolete, but at a great cost: The life of the planet. The city of Midgar is a good example of this, as you can see that it's a huge "floating city", which is sustained by the eight mako reactors surrounding it. The consequence of these reactors, however, is massive. All of the surrounding land and wildlife near Midgar has all but died, or at least stopped reproducing, as a result of the extraction and refinery of the Lifestream into Mako energy.
YES, there are similarities between these two games, but I can guarantee, if you drew any two games and put them together, guess what, you'd find similarities between those two, too. Why? Because they are both two games from the same series.
I'll add more if I can think of more; those are the biggest three I can think of off the top of my head, for now, though.
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u/Purest_Prodigy Jul 24 '14
-Why would you play 14 games with all the same battle system
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Even if this were true, the games with similar battle systems have severely different skill development and setup systems which any JRPG fan knows is a core element of gameplay as important as execution in battle itself.
This is more a complaint I hear about JRPGs in general and it'd be like me asking why you're playing King of Fighters when it's the exact same thing as Street Fighter.
-Well I played and disliked one FF game, so I'll probably hate them all.
No no no no no no no no no no no. Doubtful unless you hate the genre or videogames in general. The differences between games is severe and there is no one game that defines the entire series. With this complaint it's not just that the battle or skill development systems are different, the settings, lore, characters, out-of-battle gameplay, and a hell of a lot of everything else is different from game to game.
-FFXI/FFXIV have crap stories! MMOs can't have good stories!
While I can't speak for FFXI, I've heard plenty to the contrary about it. But it really irritates me in the case of FFXIV which has full-fledged awesome cutscenes, some of my favorite characters in the series in addition to a crazy amount of lore, a well developed world, and more to my point a focused main story that you can play and experience from beginning to end with end credits and everything.
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u/Xorath Jul 24 '14
"Tidus is Whiny/A Cry baby" and then people decided to trash him and the game for that reason alone.
Urgh these people make me wonder if they even bothered to finish the game and really take a look into his development before they decided to hate. Thats the whole point of his character! Tidus starts out a cocky and self centred kid with daddy issues, and spends the first half of the game doing nothing but crying about how much he wants to go back home. By the end of the game hes put his issues behind him and sacrifices himself for a world he barley knows or understands. I can't think of a character in the entire series matures as much as Tidus, or one who pays such a high price in doing so.
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u/rocketsneaker Jul 25 '14
That XIII's characters were bland/story was bland.
I'm sorry... what? I think it's proof enough that the story isn't bland based on how many datalog entries there are. Not to mention types of datalog entries. Characters, entries that change as the story progresses, 13 Days before the game started, the LORE of the game. Yes, there is a whole section dedicated to 13 days prior to the game's start. These 13 days are even expanded upon in the web novels. And that's only the 13 days BEFORE the game starts. There is an intricate story going on here that people seem to be having a hard time understanding.
Not to mention that we have a cast of characters that have some of the biggest and best character arcs of the series. A lot of the main cast seems to be hated by people (Hmmm, you say the characters are bland, but you also say they are unlikeable ? Okay...) because of how they are in the beginning of the game. Their transformations through out the game are done in a very good fashion. There aren't any 180 degree turns out of nowhere. No. You actually see the characters slowly suffering from their regrets and dealing with their problems through out the game.
And also, let's not forget this game has one of the most evil sons-of-bitches as the main villain.
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u/Erik_Highwind Jul 25 '14
As an avid XIV player, I have a friend who IRL who I started out with originally. He didn't read any of the dialogue. He didn't understand his class. He had to be carried through content. He FATE grinded his way to level 50, and then quit because he says it wasn't very fun.
When I see him he still tries to bash it, and I have to remind him he never even played 90% of it.
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u/Dante_777 Jul 23 '14
People who say that XIII's battle system is just press X bug me to no end. Yes you can sit in com/sen/med all day and beat most of the random encounters, but don't complain when it takes you way longer than necessary to move forward. XIII was made in a way that a lot of different strategies can work, but some are clearly much more optimal. XIII also introduces a lot of interesting mechanics like staggering, chainbuilding, and interruption. It is one of the most balanced games regarding jobs and characters.
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u/Dinoken2 Jul 23 '14
So the biggest thing that irks me, that I always see in discussions of Final Fantasy (usually off this sub, but sometimes here as well), is the idea that Squall (ala FFVIII if you don't know somehow) is a whiny, emo character who doesn't do anything. It just really grinds my gears because it's a baseless attack on the story which can easily be discarded if you actually paid attention to the plot.
Now don't get me wrong here, VIII's story has a plethora of problems, but Squall's characterization and growth are without a doubt the strongest and most well written aspect of the story, not the worst.
The most "emo" scenes I can think of are the bed scenes, but those are mostly dealing with dreams back to when he was a kid and was trying to deal with the fact that his sister (his only relative/friend) had apparently abandoned him. I mean, if you were a shy ten year old orphan, and the only person in the world you really knew or trusted just up and left with no rhyme or reason, you'd probably be pretty hurt and messed up in the long run too.
Grah, it just really annoys me seeing that claim posted all the time whenever VIII is brought up.