Is this the peak of the Final Fantasy series?

Is this the peak of the Final Fantasy series?

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Final Fantasy X is.

FF IX is a mess. FF VII is the peak here.

Yes
Lol
Both are great

X is the start of the decline.

8 > 10 > 7 > 9

In gameplay... no, because it's so slow and the fact that ATB runs during animations fucks shit up

In story... no, because disc three turns into an aimless chase followed by a dumb twist

In my personal nostalgia... oh god yes

It's certainly a candidate.

X is not.

no, but it has the best story/characters

X is terrible

true, best gameplay, didnt have to rely on elemental/embodiment of evil villain or lavos rip off, best characters

VI is better

Lel

VII was a mess too, and became even worse once Square Penix started shitting on it with all the horrible spinoffs.

Yes, it is

i agree with this, first half was so good, that direction/camera angles? perfection. Steiner is one of the best characters in the series. Too bad they couldn't hold it together in the end. I dont think they were able to make the ensemble cast feel real either. No real group discussion/dynamic like in X. That shit with Amarant at Ipsen castle was pathetic. So he agrees to follow you around for no reason, then just suddenly goes on a tirade of how he works alone? Ignoring the hours he just spent following your commands? And then hes just randomly hoisted by his own petard so we can get some tired lecture on friendship. Horrible. One of the worst parts of any final fantasy game. So ham fisted.

FFIX is a good solid game but:

Battles are way too frequent.
Battles take forever to load.
Battles have a completely unskippable cinematic intro that makes you wait before you take control.
Battles are hideously slow, even with max battle and text speed. Inexplicably even the characters preparing to attack take forever to do so.
Trance is completely worthless. Ito was stupid for breaking the limit break mechanic like this.
The ability system in this game is awful. You have to wear substandard equipment for ages in order to get useful abilities. And some are strongly recommended. Combine this with very low AP per battle (and the aforementioned battle issues) and you have a problem.
The cast is unevenly cared for. Quina, Amarant, and Freya get almost nothing. Contast that with VII where even the optional characters got substantial amounts of attention. Freya only has ~100 lines from the Cleyra event to the end of the game. What a promising character and side-plot utterly neglected. Amarant was one of the most contrive additions to your team I've ever seen in a JRPG.
The card game is worthless, which makes all those card rewards you get worthless as well. The game actually fails to communicate exactly how to play the damn game.
Speaking of mini-games all of them suck ass and apart from Chocobo's hot and cold don't even give any useful rewards to you from playing them. Seriously few Ethers or Phoenix Downs would be nice.
The plot is one of the weakest parts of the game and goes full retard when Terrans become a major plotpoint at Oeilvert.
SUDDENLY NECRON. Yea, I know him being a death incarnate, kinda fitting the game theme and possibly being a homage to Cloud of Darkness and/or Zemus. That still doesn't make him good or interesting final boss.

That said none of those flaws kept me from enjoying it but in the end I see FFIX as a good but ultimately failed attempt to merge the best aspects of older and modern FFs together.

It's one of the official meme games of Sup Forums so no it's not. It's also made for furfags and has one of if not the worst final bosses in not only an FF title but of an RPG period.

Tried it out for the first time, couldn't get past the first 20 minutes
>Backgrounds that didn't age well
>Story and battles (i played only the tutorial one) didn't have a hook to them
>Then you are switched to a manlet with a fake ticket
>They proceed to teach you a card game

Honestly if backgrounds were reworked and they didn't go for gwent from the get-go I would have probably given it a chance. I know that I'm an "ADHD shitter" but I simply couldn't find a reason to stick to it, there was nothing appealing enough that told me to continue

The peak was VI but IX is very close.

necron isnt justified. They can rationalize him and give him as much lore as they want, he still comes out of left field because they didnt have confidence in their ending which, too be fair, wasnt that strong anyway

>peak of a series where each game is different

Not really how it works.

>Trance is completely worthless. Ito was stupid for breaking the limit break mechanic like this.

I really wonder if they simply ran out of ideas and phoned it in with Trance. I mean, it sure as fuck ain't Limit Breaks.

The ending was fairly good. You go to the planet's crystal and fight to defend it.

Bruh you save your half monkey clone brother from an evil plant what game did you play?

When you realize this was supposed to be titled Gaiden instead of IX and was made to pay homage to older titles, you can notice how the main series spiraled down into experimental shit right after VII.

>Freya only has ~100 lines from the Cleyra event to the end of the game.
I woke up 3 minutes ago and now you ruined my Saturday already.

Swap 9 and 7 and this is how I rate them.

The ending fight with kuja was fine but everything after was weak, i dont think the developers had enough confidence in the ending so they through in some absolute evil

The card game gets perfectly explained in the dali weapons shop on disc 4 which i will agree is late
Now actually being able to read card stats on a crt around 2000 can be difficult
Most of the repeatable minigames have some kind of reward i know jump rope hippaul racing and the nero brothers game does

FF almost always has some metaphysical shit thrown in at the end. No one complained about the essentially QTE fight that happens with sephiroth in your head at the end of ff7.

Whether or not you personally like it, 12 is the last time Final Fantasy made forward progress in any meaningful sense.

This is the most correctest opinion

I can never understand why it's acceptable to learn abilities from items in Tactics but it's always listed as a major downside in IX?

I dunno about that. 13 had a pretty good combat system.

this and it improved each sequel. LR's system is fantastic.

6 does a lot right but I think VII was an overall better video game. The materia system is a huge upgrade to espers, the pacing and escalation of the story is incredibly strong and Cloud's arc is one of the most interesting and competently handled in the franchise. If FFVII existed without any of the fucking expanded universe shit which people conflate with the original game it would be appreciated a lot more.

Trance was a knee jerk to how exploitable limit break spamming was
Ive played through 9 probably 15 times by now and I almost always have atleast 1 character trance during a boss
But i know where all the treasures and shit are like the back of my hand so I dont waste time looking around that could push your trance meter too far but most bosses 2-3 shot any given character unless you itemize against them with resist or absorb gear before hand ao the gauge filla pretty rapid the longer you stay in fights
Which can be awhile if you have steal autism like i do

This is just incomprehensible to me. Those environments are gorgeous, and that sequence is loaded with mini rewards and fun side content. The hook is you're kidnapping a princess for larks and profit. And assembling a classic RPG party step by step before breaking it apart and making do with weird compromises. Shit, discs one and two really might be the series peak.

You are obligated to like 13's combat because literally the entire game is just a treadmill from battle to battle with zero exploration and extremely minimal world interaction in between. There's almost nothing to the game at all besides combat and graphics, and Gran Pulse doesn't even remotely begin to make up for that.

>Freya only has ~100 lines from the Cleyra event to the end of the game.

what a waste

We're trying to have a nice thread here.

>lel watch me maymay mommy

neck yourself

not that guy but ff9 has the most excruciatingly slow start of any FF

its somehow more painful than the endless city garbage at the beginning of ff7, even though it doesn't take you as long to get to the overworld

the pre-drawn low-res .jpg backgrounds was a dark period for FF, and its probably the main reason why 7-9 get shit on so much, you just want to play FF but instead you have to sit through the longest and ugliest cutscene in all of gaming

You're just shuffling between 3 ATB bars while timing guard like in Mario RPG.
Progression is stumped and limited to fetch quests even though every area is filled with encounters every 3 steps that only waste your time.
Why do people get wet over LR combat? Little more player input than XIII and XIII-2 and suddenly it's good? Don't make me laugh.

If you're that threatened by people not following the circlejerk I'm not sure this is the right website for you.

That's fine. Sometimes that's all I want. FF1 is just combat and exploration and I still enjoy the hell out of it.

maybe. But 6 at least had a consistent big bad who stated out representing elemental chaos and stuck with it to the end. Just cause games like 4 did it doesnt mean its good. 7 had lavos(jenova) come to eat the planet, and then sephiroth goes crazy because of his DNA/ learing of his fucked up origins. X did it best cause they didnt rely on absolute evil. Yu yevon was essentially a hitler like figure that was set up in advance. And the whole religion used to have an oppressed people worship their oppressor/ send out human sacrifices as a trick to make yu yevon stronger every time was pretty interesting. Only to have have a piece of the summoned city come and defeat him using his own system of sustaining power against him. Thats a good ending. Necron was a non statement.

It had the best battle theme
youtube.com/watch?v=M7sG3l5ryOk

Very few of these are actual complaints. The first four about battles alone are essentially the same complaint.

Holy shit that game just looks shit.

i dunno i thought ff7 went downhill after midgar

The part with vivi after the first fight has a handful if optional scenes and treasures along with the jump rope minigame , it sets up a really comfy and pleasant feeling
Learning about the carda is optional just like doing jumprope, gathering all the gil carda and equipment hidden about, the inn scene with the pissed off people, and hippauls hidden treasure. You can go straight to the booth and then down the alley ans over the rooftops in like 2 minutes, all the rest is to give you a feel for the world and character
Also holy shit the backgrounds are 10/10 how many marijuanas did you inject

>The cast is unevenly cared for. Quina, Amarant, and Freya get almost nothing.

Why are these characters even in the game? They basically have nothing to do. If you took them out, would the game be better or worse?

youtube.com/watch?v=rUCeXApQxNw

>knee jerk to how exploitable limit break spamming was

Definitely, and fewer fancy animations you watch 50 times is a good thing. I think the problem is that some characters have Trances that are kind of feeble, so it's more annoying when an actually important one like Dyne triggers at the wrong time

freya couldve just been an interesting npc, instead they gave her too much play time without the proper attention

I thought the ending of 10 was garbage. The unlosable last fight was worse than necron in every way. Jecht was good though.

its the only one i like so yes

They're there to give you gameplay options or if you just hate one of the 'Main' party. It's like complaining about Umaro. The game is better because they mix up your party during discs 2/3 and give you freedom of choice at the end. If you don't like them, ignore them

>That's fine
Okay but the argument was that XII was the last game to move the series forward.

So suddenly about it though, 13 had good combat.

yu yevon fight was ceremonial just like head cannon sephiroth was, it wasnt great but at least it made sense in the context of their plan.

What the hell was Trance anyway? The characters changed into weird ass colors and costumes for no reason. Did they ever explain why that happens?

The last dungeon is also terrible and just the same idea as the FF9 one with worse execution. Hype breaking in, then a total waste of time.

Oh definately
Shit quinas trance is pretty much useless as fuck beyond the stat boost and status effect heal since the "special" effect is just being abld to eat things at 50% onstead of 25%

I don't think calling out 13 for being a horrendous mess equates 'not following the circlejerk.' 13 has the most vapid and interchangeable cast in the FF universe, the battle system is braindead and immensely simplified to the point of tedium, the story is beyond weak (which given the amount of extra reading you have to do just to begin to follow it, let alone understand it is utterly inexcusable) and full of gaping asspulls and conveniences, cyrstarium is completely pointless, Vanille's weapon is offensively stupid and the OST is easily the weakest in the history of the franchise. That last one is my own opinion, the rest are fairly objective.

The necron fight wasnt bad in terms of gameplay, it was just nonsense that made the story like weak. Yu yevon was a cutscene fight after the real final challenge.

I think innovating on combat is a step forward personally. In what way do you think 12 moved the series forward? I suppose FF hadn't done a political plot in a while.

A strong surge of emotion
Its why it happens when the black waltz btfo out of the regular black mages and shit talks vivi on the cargo ship and when steiner thinka him and beatrix might die defending alexandra from mistodons regardless of where the bar is at before then
Steiner explains it in the first fight against the plant cage in evil forest

>Yu yevon was a cutscene fight after the real final challenge.

Ah yes, the challenge of pressing attack three times.

Trance is triggered by a surge of emotions. There's no actual explanation for how or why that happens, but trance itself is important to Kuja's motivations. There's some subtext in Vivi's ability to achieve trance as well.

the last dungeon wasnt great but the Seymour fight was dope. At least it was short and you probably had some no encounter armor by that point

Yeah, it killed the ending for me way worse than necron did.

I agree actually. I forgot how bad it was.

Then it should have been over quick like the sephiroth one. It killed the pacing and the tension.

The battle system was great. It's almost objectively less simple than most of the series. The characters weren't fantastic but they get more shit than they deserve. The plot and level design was ass though I think 10 gets a pass for nearly equally shitty level design which is weird to me.

>13 had a pretty good combat system.

Gutted X-2 isn't "good"

I liked memoria even if it wasnt as hyped as the silver dragon cutscene and fight beforehand
Better than the fucking crystal tower from 3 atleast and didnt gimp you like edeaa castle did
Had good gear and hard as fuck card battles to

are you trying to say the jecht fight was easy? I mean these aren't very hard games but id say it was at least on par with the rest of the series

So it was basically like turning Super Saiyan?

>It's almost objectively less simple than most of the series.
I am interested in understanding why you think this. You have 0 customisation outside your "role."

It's not gutted x-2. The whole chaining thing was new. Buffs and debuffs and status are not only useful but nearly mandatory. It has tanking as a thing which was cool. ATB refresh was a neat mechanic as well.

People like to call 13 mash X to win, but funnily enough because of the chain system it's one of the few FFs you can't actually do that in. In my playthrough of X-2 I beat the final boss holding down X with two dark knights and an alchemist tossing mega potions.

I don't know anyone who wasn't hitting 70k+ per hit during the jecht fight because they cleared out omega first.
But omega was a "real" fight in the PAL release unlike the US where you can't easily one shot him, can only do it with wakka attack reels from memory

Yes i mean shit zidane and kuja both go ssj4 during trance

Character building is not the same as the battle system in my eyes. The actual execution of optimal play in 13 is more complex than the rest of the series. They even have a rating system to tell you if you were doing well or not.

In terms of character customization I think I preferred it to something like the sphere grid or base ff12 (zodiac was great) because at the end of the game the characters still have distinct roles. I don't like games where every character can do everything.

youtube.com/watch?v=S8dN3mrfjeY

9 02

I like the designs but resolution sinks the whole experience down for me. I get that the whole thing is very comfy but even inability to quickly skip through dialogue takes me out of the experience. Maybe if i was a little tipsy it would have been cool.

Overall I can see that it can be appreciated, i just don't feel that there is any part of the experience that you "have" to play for, nothing really stands out.

But for everyone to be able to do everything in Final Fantasy 10, you would have to grind levels like crazy

12 had a significantly large world with a fuckton of NPCs that all had dialogue which changed throughout the game to reflect current events, even in areas you had no reason to be in at the time. The gambit system, hunts, and bazaar mechanics were all new, enemies interacting with each other in real time on the map was new, the guest system was interesting as well. The whole package was a big step forward from 10, and while it drew plenty of inspiration from 11, we haven't had a single game since 12 that fits the Final Fantasy mold with as much depth and polish as it delivers.

I didnt find omega ruins until weeks after i beat jecht
Shit the only weapon i had with break damage limit was aurons celestial weapon and i think tidus was still using brotherhood and i was only doing like 8k damage with him and around 15k with auron
Granted this was in 2002 or so before I had internet and i knew better than to try and go find everything before the end because of how much of a cakewalk doing that made ff6-9

>streamlined "classes"
>only control of one character
>8(?) presets of classes for all characters

De/buffs being mandatory isn't a good thing either, since you just go in cycles of com/rav/rav to syn/sab/com(or med), changing to whatever sen setup your preference is when the the fight actually requires it, going through the motions every fight. Stagger could be seen as an extension of the chain system in X-2, but I think stagger was hot garbage and tedium incarnate anyway.

X-2 isn't without it's problems, catnip being the most obvious one, but it has a way better mechanical base that could've been expanded upon in 31.

Man, people talk about Tidus looking like Meg Ryan, Zidane looks just as much like her as Tidus does.

Thats a pc port problem
Square lost the original assets so they just stretched the ps1 ones
Still looks decsnt imo though Ive played ff9 twice since it got released on pc
You could also breeze through the opening by turning on 4x speed they added in the pc version by the way

IX is the best FF game and anyone who says differently doesn't know what they are fucking talking about.

God I forgot how awful the US ps1 final fantasy arts were.

Ok, but even if you didn't you're just going to take the three characters with good overdrives and then quick hit your way to victory.

The guest system was as old as FF3 and most of the other stuff you describe existed in older games as well. I agree 12 is a fantastic game I just don't know if it pioneered as much as you think it did.

I enjoy the combat in both games honestly, but I think it's much harder to execute a good fight in 13. The fact that you heal after battles and the retry option meant they could crank the difficulty on random fights as well. I appreciate when fights aim to kill me instead of whittling down my mp. All of the difficulty in x-2 was in optional content.

I always hear people complaining about the Gambits in Final Fantasy 12, but I really liked it

I have no idea who you're talking to but im pretty sure 99% of the people who played this game didn't have 'break damage limit' by the time they reached jecht. I can see why you would find him easy if you grinded out the levels to beat the super boss at the end of the hidden optional dungeon before you even fought the final boss. But if you're suggesting that everyone who played the game did this, or that this is the intended route for the game, then thats ridiculous. You cant claim that the final boss is easy or poorly balanced if you grinded enough to beat the super boss before you even fought him. You're literally doing the post game first.

yeah i think they worked for what the game was

No other final boss can be killed that easily after doing optional content that easily in my experience. Safer Sephiroth with kotr maybe, but he still scales with your level from memory. Maybe 8 using hero souls/dog moon limit break.

The only mainline I haven't beaten are 3 and 15

I always hear people talk about which is the best Final Fantasy, but which game is considered the worst Final Fantasy ?

Yes. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

FF4

It's subjective but 2 for me. I love the SaGa series so I don't hate the concept, but the execution was poor. The pacing is also rough.

Still pissed to this date in regards to a few setpiece battles such as the Black Waltz. Man they had such great presentation, but then it falls flat 'cause they suck ass and die quick. Black Waltz 3 has such a badass scene at the cargo ship and he was smoked so quickly. I always had a thought he would become a rival character for Vivi or a secret boss. Is there any reference left in the game from them after the first disc?

Also freya was a piss poor attempt at shoe horning drama and it stalled there. Clerya and Burmecia were GOAT dungeons.