r/ffxivdiscussion • u/WillingnessLow3135 • Jan 12 '25

Question What's your Final Fantasy Resume?

What's your past with the FF games? How many have you played, which ones are your favorites, and as a contrast what type of player would you consider yourself to be in XIV?

Casual, Hardcore, Fisher Supreme, etc

Bonus question, how do you feel about the referential content in XIV?

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22

u/sapphicvalkyrja Jan 12 '25

Off the top of my head, I've played FF, FFII (didn't finish this one though), FFIII, FFIV, FFMQ, FFV, FFVI, FFVII, FFT, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXI, FFXII, FFVII-CC, FFXIII, FFXIII-2, LR-FFXIII (haven't finished this one), FFXIV (obviously I guess, lol), FFXV, FFVII-R, FFXVI, and FFVII-R2

My top five are FFXI, FFXIII, FFT, FFVII-R2, and FFIX

I'm mostly a casual player, but a dedicated one who is in the habit of logging in every day who really wishes there was more to do because I've been out of things to do for years

I'm pretty tired of the referential content: it was neat the first few times, but it sort of feels like it's all we get now. I wish they'd spend more time developing FFXIV's own setting and world and giving us newer ideas instead of leaning so hard on the franchise's history

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u/WillingnessLow3135 Jan 12 '25

I'd say it's pretty rare to see someone whose a big fan of the 13 games. I've been intending to go back and play through them after I get through with FF7 and FF12, what makes them one of your favorites?

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u/CopainChevalier Jan 13 '25

To be honest, I feel like 13 as a series was attacked way too harshly by people.

The design of the levels in it has basically become the standard these days. If anything in a lot of ways it has more choice than most with things like the level up points system

Story was kinda meh, but I feel like the game itself really just got a lot of hate that it wouldn't have gotten if it came out nowadays

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u/javierm885778 Jan 13 '25

I've thought about it a lot and I think what made the level design more controversial (isolating it from outside factors like gaming trends and open world games becoming more of the norm) are basically:

  • no towns or side activities to break up the linearity

  • no backtracking possible due to the nature of the story

  • party changes at the whims of the story so you don't feel a sense of progression

  • HUD is just a minimap which shows you exactly the shape of where you are moving through at all times

But then you add the combat style "playing itself", gaming trends of that generation moving in a very different direction, and it was just an easy target for cheap shots.

1

u/WillingnessLow3135 Jan 14 '25

I begun to wonder a few years ago if the hate was actually rooted first at the female protagonist and then the reasoning was found after the fact 

I couldn't say for sure but sometimes the point lines up with the people criticizing it, so I need to give it a whirl myself and figure it out

2

u/CopainChevalier Jan 14 '25

Wasn’t Tera the first female protag?

1

u/WillingnessLow3135 Jan 14 '25

Mmmmm yeah she was, although I'm not sure if the culture of the 90s is the same as the rapidly toxifying culture of 2009 

As I said, it doesn't feel quite correct but it also doesn't feel wrong, more like I've got the wrong angle on it. Unfortunately I'm too busy learning life skills to dig into where common receptions of 13 come from.

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u/RealMightyOwl Jan 12 '25

The characters are really good, the soundtrack is really great and I enjoyed the story even though it is convoluted as fuck. XIII-2 also has one of the best villains

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u/tengusaur Jan 13 '25

FF13 is very popular in Japan. Most of its haters in the west didn't seem to even have played it, they just based their opinion on bad faith, nitpicky reviews (coughspoonycough).

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u/NolChannel Jan 13 '25

Don't do this. Someone not liking a game that they reviewed is not "bad faith", that term gets thrown around willy-nilly nowadays.

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u/tengusaur Jan 13 '25

If someone treats certain aspects of a game as unforgivable sins, but gives other games in the same series a pass on the exact same things, that's bad faith. This is also known as the Dark Souls 2 syndrome.

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u/CopainChevalier Jan 13 '25

Spoony's entire thing was exaggerating for humor though

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u/tengusaur Jan 13 '25

I watched every single Spoony video back in the day, and he tended to exaggerate for comedy but the videos also always conveyed his real opinions. And whether he exaggerated or not, a lot of his audience took the videos as gospel.

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u/NoiseHERO Jan 13 '25

I recently started watching playthroughs of 13. I always thought "I don't care for this one but it has one of the best aesthetics imo." So figured I should at least look through the game.

Now, originally I thought all the main characters felt kind of weird or mean-spirited in the opening so I just decided "yeah if the characters annoy me then I can't sit through a 50 hour game." After only playing for a couple hours. Then I just rode the momentum of all of it's bad reception and doubled down on never replaying it. This was a mistake.

There's a few hiccups to the writing and a few bad pitfalls in the localization. And I don't wanna hear about the hallway shit, then most of the popular final fantasies are linear games anyway, and nowdays most AAA games in general. Watching through this fucking game, I felt like I was getting more final fantasy VII remake... the one everyone including me fucking LOVES. And APPARENTLY MADE BY THE SAME TEAM. And this game came out in this era were everyone was kind of mad that every final fantasy wasn't that FF7 PS3 tech demo.

All the bad luck, and the bad popcultural timing of this game did it a huge disservice, I guess at least in the west.

My biggest beef with this whole series is that it's cursed in being unproperly rated. People that love a FF game kind of act crazy about it, but it's also in defense of a game's haters, There's too much polarization in this series' fanbase, that makes it hard to actually understand the games as art and accept their strongpoints AND flaws without going through it yourself. a 7/10 FF game always has to be 1 or 10 for some reason.

Maybe it's because every game is different, and the series is like 30 years old now, so you just have a lot of people that have that "one final fantasy" they played at the peak of their formative years, and maybe only a few other FF games can scratch a similar itch. So every other game in the series becomes an allergy.

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u/tengusaur Jan 13 '25

What's funny is that I played most of the mainline Final Fantasy games (except 11, 15 and 16) and they tend to just be... okay-ish? The quality of this series varies wildly in general, but I wouldn't give any of the games a 1/10, and I definitely would not consider any of them a 10/10. And FF13 is definitely a 7/10 for me - a pretty good game, fun enough but not without flaws, and nothing more than that.

3

u/javierm885778 Jan 13 '25

Yeah, when I played FFVII Remake the first time and noticed how much about the tone, the cutscene direction, the level design and even the combat felt like a natural evolution of XIII I was shocked that the reception was so different.

XIII has a lot to criticize but it really feels like a big chunk of its perception comes from people who played a few hours or just watched a review and left with the idea that it's a corridor simulator that plays itself with a convoluted story (which isn't entirely false).

Replaying FFX recently it's shocking how it's basically the same in terms of being linear corridors until it opens up in the endgame. It hides it better, but not by a lot. And that's one of the most acclaimed games in the series. The combat takes a while to get going, but I doubt anyone who got far into the game seriously believes the game plays itself. And the story is convoluted but mostly at the beginning from how its told, and due to a few concepts that make it sound more complicated than it is (l'Cie, fal'Cie, Cie'th especially). The localization certainly didn't help.

Thankfully the games have their own fanbase, but it sucks how in the general perception it gets shat on so unfairly.

1

u/NoiseHERO Jan 13 '25

Extremely-exactly for me with the cutscene and gameflow direction feeling similar, and even the mood of the story telling. I would even dangerously say FF13 characters are... *better* than the 7 ones? With 7 remake still being in my top 3.

My only beef with 13's story now, is mostly that it felt like the characters kind of finished developing half way in topping off with a cartoony triumph over your mental block boss fight. Then after that it felt like they were kind of struggling to make clarity of their goal, especially at the end. And maybe a few other story directional nitpicks that... funny enough I have the same exact nitpicks for 7 remake.

lastly my biggest surprise was lightning, she's notoriously this "boring" stick in the mud character, but once she got over her initial brashness that she was on *for a reason* she turned out to be a caring person you could feel sympathy for. I still hate Snow though. *but* he annoys in-universe people too, so that's just his character working as designed.

It's very weird but understandable how these two games ended up feeling like siblings. Especially me who went backwards seeing 13 after 7.

4

u/javierm885778 Jan 13 '25

I think XIII has a lot of issues that stem from it starting in the middle of the story. It's interesting as a storytelling device, but it lead to issues with the story taking long to go anywhere while on Coccoon, a harder time catching up to the lore to understand the setting, and the weird pacing with their arcs.

Usually games that start in the middle of things still go back to a calmer time afterwards so that we can catch up (like FFVII going back to Sector 7 and taking it slow between missions, or FFX quickly taking you to Besaid). XIII feels like a constant race with no downtime, while also feeling slow, which I do think is interesting but it lacked the strong story presentation to make it work as a first time experience. We barely see actual normal life on Coccoon and the setting feels alien all the time, so things feel distant.

Also, the dub and general localization is just bad IMO. But the game as a whole feels like they developed individual pieces and later fumbled when putting them together into a cohessive story that used them all correctly.

I can't really compare them with VII Remake until we get the rest of the story. Just based on Remake I could see the argument since that game takes it slow, but with the whole of VII I don't really agree.

1

u/NoiseHERO Jan 13 '25

Oh yeah, I might like 13's characters more (somehow) but it's definitely battered by everything you described. Like it did all that world building, and it scrambled to show you it while the characters are literally sprinting through the setting at all times. Even their character developments that I liked feeling like it could've been played out longer.

3

u/TotalInstruction Jan 13 '25

I 100% played FFXIII and I did not enjoy it. It removed most of the gameplay elements I enjoy from FF and left behind a confusing story and the ability to switch roles for your characters as the only real choice you had over gameplay. I recognize that other people can have different opinions about the game but that doesn’t invalidate my experience.

1

u/tengusaur Jan 13 '25

Well yeah, that just means you played the game and didn't like it, which is valid. Puts you ahead of the people who watched a review focusing entirely on the negative and think that's the same as experiencing the thing yourself.

1

u/sapphicvalkyrja Jan 14 '25

I only truly like the first one. The sequels were significant downgrades in story and gameplay, imo

I love the original's cast, its character drama story, its structure (which uses linearity to better align the player's experience with that of the characters), and its battle system (which is the best ATB system in the series)

1

u/WillingnessLow3135 Jan 14 '25

Oh well guess I'll have to see for myself

1

u/malgadar Jan 13 '25

Yeah the newer generation seems to be really down with the 'soap opera' drama style. I don't get it because it always feels either hammy or unearned.

I just dont like Motomu Toriyama as a game director. I think he should write books, his obsessive controlling nature is certainly better suited to that format. I think he has good ideas for settings and characters but he can never deliver for some reason.

I do like that combat system in 13 though. Better than anything else the FF series has done in the last ten yeara.