The Final Fantasy Thread 2.0 | FFXV: OUT NOW! It Really Did Exist

General Discussion
821

Ok, so just got finished with the FFXIII demo.

My thoughts:

  1. Intro FMV is straight up amazing. In terms of FMV, Square is still the king worldwide. I don’t think I’ve seen anything better outside of Wall-E.

  2. Story is pretty interesting. You’re playing variously as a military defector who is now fighting against the military, and a band of rebels trying to escape from an underworld. The army is trying to purge the underworld for some reason. Story-wise, it looks good. Far from the absurd and embarassing stories of for instance Infinite Undiscovery and (shudder) the Last Remnant. Hopefully it will not get ultra-shitty later on like FFXII did.

  3. Characters are mostly likable, even the black guy with the chocobo in his afro (shockingly).

  4. There is a MILF.

  5. So everything’s essentially nice except…the gameplay itself I found pretty boring. Long, corridor like environments with basically no interactibility except for opening a few treasure chests. Yes, that’s a JRPG standard, but frankly it’s fucking boring nowadays. At least let me fucking jump. Anything. The environments are just boring.

  6. Second complaint: ATB battle system is now much more real-time and features more interactivity, but it’s still the same old shit. There are no action components to it at all, and you can probably get through the demo by spamming circle. However, each fight is graded and it looks like you probably get some EXP bonus if you do them right, so there is an incentive to maintain chains and pay attention to small fights. Only problem is there are no levels/exp in the demo so it doesn’t mean much.

  7. The enemy fights are basically all the same and got pretty repetitive.

Anyways, yeah I’m looking forward to the game I suppose, but it’s not a huge priority for me. I’ve just grown out of RPG gameplay and find it too boring, even when it’s mostly real-time with no segue between battles and map.

822

Why not play RPGs that have more complicated gameplay?

BoF: Dragon Quarter, Etrian Odyssey, Wizardry , etc.

And Mount and Blade, cause Mount and Blade is just that damn awesome.

823

Will the demo actually play on american PS3’s? Loving the battle system.

824

any1 seen ff7 acc since is out already in japan?

825

I’m enjoying Valkyria Chronicles. That has a good amount of ‘different’ gameplay in it from just A-tapping RPGs. For the most part though I’m happy with shooters, fighters and FPSs. Don’t feel like investing the time in what usually turn out by the end to be huge dissapointments.

826

Fair enough. VC is great, but I keep forgetting to play it.

I just thought I’d throw out some other games if you were wanting to give the genre another shot.

827

Lightning seems like she’s doing backflips wayyyy to often. Kinda gets on my nerves.

Other than that the game looks fantastic. The sound scores get me all giggityyy. Graphically the game looks crazy impressive. There’s a lot of stuff happening in the background. Gameplay wise, just looks like a standard jrpg.

828

thank God for the following:

turn based battle system
battle themes
boss themes

ppl might not like turn based games or boring corridor sequences or whatever but thats the type of ish that i like in an rpg. if i wanted first person shooter without the gun then i’d play one.

the thing that i didn’t like was the dude with the afro. ish was wack. he was a pansy, too. oh well. looks like he’ll be out of my party ASAP. the other dudes in the latter parts of the demo looked dope to play.

what would be really good is if they could make ffXIII versus turn based and bring back magic. thats the game that everyone wants to play anyway. i’m more interested in that story and those characters…

829

LOL, does that mean that FF fights will now actually involve skill?

Ugh…this sounds like just another excuse to add more flashy cutscene attacks that add no depth to the game (i.e. Limit Breaks)

Let’s hope it’s not as bad as the License Board. Seriously, the License Board was shit. Everything was so close together it was practically impossible not to put the same shit on every character, there was no room to individualize your characters at all, and clearly the designers were coasting on the visual representation hiding the fact that the system added nothing to the game.

I’ll take a simple list of abilities which can be purchased with points, that actually has room to customize your characters and stuff you want to get, like Final Fantasy Tactics’ ability system, over some paper thin “Magical Doohicky Chart” any day. I swear these days SE puts more effort into coming up with gimmicky names and visual icons to dress up the same old shit (this time it’s the active stereotoiphodal inactive antipode anemone battle system) than actually designing the mechanics of the game.

Thank god.

I was excited when I heard 1up claim that FF13 “had no XP system” though I expect this is mostly just a gimmick (SE prolly just renamed XP to “gobldeegook points” or some shit this time around).

I used to love JRPG’s and I’ve played pretty much all the Square classics and loved them, but in recent years I just can’t tolerate their bullshit anymore. The genre has long since ceased to actually attempt anything resembling fun. Somewhere early on down the line it seems the idea was that turn based battles were supposed to put emphasis on strategy over twitch action gameplay, but pretty quickly it degenerated into just being an excuse to level grind and win by jerking off your characters through doing repetitive mindless bullshit ad nauseam. I’d say somewhere around FFIV they struck a good balance between leveling up, and actual strategy, and Final Fantasy Tactics was a piece of genius…but largely SE has failed to captilize on any of those successes in gameplay design and prefers instead to dress up stale, empty bullshit with hifalutin names and 15 minute attack cutscenes.

JRPG’s have the potential to once again offer quality gameplay, if developers were willing to completely strip experience level systems out of the equation and focus on things like strategy, skill, and exploration…you know, actual depth. Level grinding is the antithesis of depth and fun; it’s just filler and mucks up the mechanics of the game. However, given that it’s much more marketable profitable for companies like SE to just turn out really pretty, mindless games which rewards nerds for in-game masturbation…this is clearly not going to happen. I’ll just avoid these games then since I can no longer do the same old “attack, attack, attack, attack, heal, rinse repeat” routine with a straight face, and cannot avoid quitting the game after 5 minutes of the same boring shit.

830

FFVersusXIII is where its at. KH battle system+ Advent Children FMV team+ Tetsuya Nomura on story an character= Auto-Success

831

Wait, what? I mean, I agree with FFT, but FFIV? Really? The game with one of the more rigid systems since you don’t have much flexibility in customisation so part of the strategy WOULD be “Goddammit, I need to level up?”

Also, how’d you miss FFX-2 and FFXII? Granted, you can beat them by overleveling…but you can beat FFIV and FFT by overleveling too.

832

^^And thats why you plaz P3: Fes and P4. The World Ends With You seems refreshing.

833

I’ll vouch for Persona 4. Though I’ve taken a break from it at the moment, I enjoy it immensely. It’s the first JRPG in a long time to truly entertain me. The characters are all great, all wonderfully voice-acted and very likeable, and the combat is fun and thoughtful.

834

Anyone here playing Crystal Defenders?

835

I don’t think customization necessarily equates to strategy. Most of the boss battles that might give you trouble in FFIV are all about using the right in-battle tactics - if you get the right procedure down with each party member even the toughest bosses (except the final dungeon) will fold in 1 or 2 minutes without any extra leveling. One of my favorite features of FFIV is how the lack of HP inflation cuts out the filler bullshit - if you have the right strategy, you will cut down the boss quite quickly, but if you have the wrong strategy, you will get raped very quickly. There is very little repeating of the same loops over and over to get to the conclusion of the battle, less redundancy.

By comparison, if you look at FFV, which was very similar but had customization, a lot of the best best boss strategies are like “make everyone a summoner have everyone do the same spell ad nauseam.”

What about em? I played them and was not impressed. Further details here.

836

I played the demo and laughed my ass off when I saw that Square actually expected me to pay 800 points for it. I would have laughed at 400, too.

For comparison: Sonic 2 (the best Sonic game ever made the 3D ones suck Sonic Team sucks I have to state that every time I mention Sonic) is 400 points. Aegis Wing is free. Square wants $10 USD for garbage. There are far, FAR better Flash games over at Kongregate for free.

837

i just watched the full demo, and… why isn’t there a final fantasy theme park, again? I really don’t want to overhype a game and have it be a huge disappointment (read: super smash bros. brawl), for a game that’s 2 years away… it looks incredible already.

It may push me to buy a PS3 by that point.

838

Man, that guy summed up everything I thought about FFXII, I’m hoping that 13 can revitalize FF for me, but for now I’m just playing Tatics and A2…some good games right there.

839

I stopped expecting anything substantial from SE a long time ago(if I’m going to play a JRPG I’ll let Atlus take care of it), and XIII does not look like it will try to change much. Will have great graphics and sound/music like always, but will have a easily interchangeable story and dull, completely over-done and out-dated gameplay. I’m betting on that. Why doesn’t SE just go make me my Vagrant Story 2 sequel already and at least show they have SOME creativity left in them?(I know the answer but…)

840

Despite the ability of both the PS3 and 360 to support updateable games, I bet you anything that within a year of finally getting the NA version of the game, there will be a Japanese-only special edition.