Best Final Fantasy poll !!

i think i was already ready to not play FFXIII, to be fair, it just confirmed it in so many (SO MANY) words

of the ones I've played through at least mostly:

VI > V > IV > VII > I > IX

I played the first part of X but got confused and discouraged and the graphics + story development gave me a headache. surprisingly haven't played FFVIII.

what version of V did u play? iirc the famicom version is significantly harder than the psx/nds rereleases & a little more interesting to play. it probably is the most challenging ff

also ffIII is p great if you have a nds

i am enjoying this tim rogers piece whilst simultaneously wondering whether i shouldn't be doing some work instead

i have a copy of XIII sitting on my shelf, unopened, waiting for the critical revisioning that declares it a misunderstood classic

I played the fan-translated super famicom ROM. FF5 was the easiest final fantasy for me!! I love the job system.

I just started FFIII. It's a terrible translation but I think that is just going to make it all the more entertaining for me.

I really liked the car game in IX

I thought FFV was almost identical in all versions... FFIV on GBA had a combat bug where the enemies don't get a chance to attack, and of course the SNES version was seriously butchered. Was that what you were thinking of?

iirc some of the classes were rebalanced for the na release of V. also some of the monsters had their hp and other stats reduced so there wasnt as big a jump btw difficulties. cant remember if they "fixed" the ridiculous drop rates or not but i think it was less expensive to buy equipment.

what made V so difficult for me was a) the # of one shot items b) the randomness of hidden items/dungeons/bosses c) the amount of grinding required to get job skills c) timed dungeons

timed dungeons u just throw a thief in your party and you're golden

which Final Fantasy was the last to use this theme tune?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHK06a-zWQ

not the one with the harp arpeggios which I suppose is technically the theme song of the series but I've always considered this the Final Fantasy theme proper. I haven't played a lot of the recent FFs but it seems like it might not have been used after FF5.

i guessed what song that was before i clicked play - immediately thinking V was the last one to use it, though since I haven't played any of them since VIII i can't say for sure

all of them have it somewhere, to my knowledge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yQ9x_iVUSQ

ff13 changed it a bit (start at 1:50)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BucX_Wdzba4

7 and 9 used it in the end credits.

ah yeah 6 uses it in the end credits too.

battles in ff1 are so slowwwww

Missed!

would've voted for X-2

highly recommend staring @ this

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkicqxXP591qb01n4o1_500.gif

while listening to this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONdHEDeWifs&feature=related

i read the mention of an 18,000 word tim rogers article on ffxiii and thought 'i wonder if i want to invest the amount of time it will take to actually read that'. and then two posts later it turned out i had already wasted that 45 minutes of my life and had forgotten it and now have nothing to show for the process.

xpost ade otoh that was a very well spent six minutes

haha im currently playing through ffIII ON iPHONE its p good actually

p terrible that V didnt get any votes shits p tite imo

I am playing VII again. It's barely a game but the story is great.

i finally got around to beating ff7 a year or two ago. i thought being older would make it easier to understand but it was still confusing as shit.

XIII wtf is wrong with you

vii might be my least favorite if only because i was such a vi fanboy & cld never really get any ~distance~ from it. ix was the psx iteration i like the best partly because of the reintroduction of character classes

think i'd say ix now, but i am very milquetoast after all

now that i think abt tho theres no way vi is worse than viii - thats probably my least favorite

FF9 never really did much for me! FF7 is way better imo. I never played FF8, but I feel like they should have gone further in the FF6/FF7 steampunk dystopian direction.

iirc FF9 starts out great but after you pull off the opening heist or w/e it really loses steam imo - that was the game that made me go "i guess i've outgrown JRPGs"

FF8 has a lot going for it

i agree w/what lamp said in the challops thread re: finding something to like about every FF game (that i've played) though i dont love any of them unreservedly either

haha ive been thinking that starting w/ viii in particular they began to lose the ability to match depth of gameplay with the scope & ambition of the game's story & the games become plodding & uneven. part of it too seems to be a desire to do something superficially new w/o really confronting the core problem - battles are mostly boring & the most foolproof strategy for beating the games end up making them uninteresting.

i mean theres a lot of things i like abt the more 'modern' final fantasys - xi in particular is pretty fun - & tbh id probably have to replay them to have real 'opinions' abt them but i think the series really manifests a disconnect btw intent & execution around viii that theyve never recovered from...

part of it too seems to be a desire to do something superficially new w/o really confronting the core problem - battles are mostly boring & the most foolproof strategy for beating the games end up making them uninteresting.

otm

though i think scope & ambition wrt the story ceased to be important somewhere around ix too - an incredibly lazily written game

viii was mega interesting to me at the time b/c of how it encouraged lateral thinking when it came to the battle system. this otm iow:

I voted for VIII because of the tricks it played on VI/VII players. Levels? Useless. Magic? Useless. Gil? You'll never use it. Equipment? No equipment; equip your magic instead. The big military corporation? Good guys!

― abanana, Monday, November 12, 2007 11:44 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

i always seemed to find X and X-2 way more enchanting than most other fans

with X i think it was a combination of a few things wrt the combat that really clicked with me (true turn-based + extremely rapid battles = perfect 2 me) plus having cut scenes with actual voice acting makes a story-based game way more immersive imo, plus having non-static environments - it all just felt refreshing at the time

X-2 also felt refreshing just by dint of not taking itself very seriously plus i thought it was cool that it was female-centric instead of being another brofest - i think i remember tombot dismissing it as fanfiction at the time but 2 me that feeling of being unafraid to be trivial struck me as somehow brave in the context of the genre

oh and X-2 had the best combat system

yeah i recall the junction system being laboured & limiting but that cld be my own bias talking. also i havent played that game since i was ~15

i mean i liked the non-intuitive xp system in ii, which is cleverly cruel but its really simple - you get better & the things you do consistently & lose capability w/ the skills you dont so you always have to make real choices abt what your characters are doing - whereas all viii did was make stat maxing more complicated

i liked x-2 on release but im such a sucker for class changes & the sandbox-y nature of it was a fun departure. but i think its kinda ugly or least really dated looking now

i generally have low standards when it comes to graphics, and i haven't played it since it came out, but i bet i'd still find it easier on the eyes than FF7

whereas all viii did was make stat maxing more complicated

yeah i'd say this is otm

FF5 is my fav in terms of overall gameplay. Love the class system!

materia still the best magic system ever. just such a constant pleasure to level up in vii, kinda gives me a glimpse into that super otaku world of dudes who kill time dungeon grinding in like Megami Tensai or whatever

p terrible that V didnt get any votes shits p tite imo

feel like this really does deserve consideration as the best final fantasy

the real qn tho is should i continue playing them in order or skip to 6 and 7 and go on to 8

tbh my predominant memory of ff5 is grinding the basement of galuf's castle w/lv5 death to get mad AP. which is a tedious memory

though its still a p good game!

i say play it

in order

yeah ive played through every ff game this year in order although i raced through iv on a rom version cuz i dont really like it very much & didnt really fuck w/ any sidequests or even trying to level. but ive spent crazy hours on vi and vii already so im tempted to

v has a lot of grinding but i think it generally 'interesting' grinding. i mean it even gives you time mage spells to facilitate grinding! also i think part of the challenge of the game is finding ways of quickly accruing ap (esp in hard-to-grind jobs like bard), which is kinda neat to me. but i think the best part is that there are multiple objectives that you can work on simultaneously while grinding a handful of which have real in-game value.

hey are any of those fuckin dissidia games worth the trouble?

i tried a 4-class run of FFV last year and i had to quit around 2/3rds of the way through. god it was boring.

yeah i think trying a single class challenge run p severely mistakes what makes this game good

how are people playing FFV, is there an alternative to the GBA version?

roms

also PSN/Wii VC releases are coming soon (i own the lousy ps1 anthology, too)

the ps1 version is truly horrible

im playing the gba version on an emulator because i want to try the bonus dungeon/classes