LogFAQs > #954852110

I have an A rank for treasures, must've missed too many somehow :( I thought I was thorough!

I also finished with 73 unique cards for Tetra Master. And there's blackjack on the homescreen now?? Oh, PS1 era games.

So discussing the game as a whole- would you believe it, I greatly enjoyed my time playing! The gameplay is... well it's fine, passable, but obviously not why you're here. It's kind of amazing how little the battle system has changed since IV, but I guess if it ain't broke. I did quite like the equipment system though, kind of part V part VII. I know everybody hates Trance but I like the concept of it, changing commands to more powerful versions for a limit break is cool. But there's very little control over it, it's automatic and disappears after battle, and only comes around once in a blue moon. I guess they did that so people couldn't cheese it by saving up Trances for boss fights, but still meh. The 'Dagger couldn't concentrate' thing didn't bother me in the slightest, it was incredibly fitting for the story and it's brief enough.

The game was a bit on the easy side, and there was a weirdly long stretch with no bosses at one point, but it didn't detract from the experience very much. The monsters were generally fine (except one cat who shall remain unnamed), decent designs but nothing mindblowing, some nice references to old games. Outside of battle, I like how much they tried to mix up the gameplay for various sidequests and stuff but they didn't all work for me, and as said several times in this topic many of the sidequests are just way too obtuse and needed more in-game explanations.

Of course the highlights are the plot, characters, structure, pacing, atmosphere, and themes. They pretty much nailed all this, even with this game being a throwback to older entries the plot felt fresh and fun, and the darker tone and seriousness with which the game tackled its life and death themes really kept everything grounded to some kind of reality. Despite my misgivings about how some characters disappear from the narrative, I like how each of them represents different aspects of the game's themes, and they really do all gel together to form one pretty great thesis on what it means to live.

Structure-wise, I thought the shift from medieval war to sci-fantasy existentialism was done really well. Disc 1 sets the world up but is generally still pretty interesting, disc 2 is just a wild ride from start to (almost) finish with constant surprises, disc 3 starts off weirdly quiet but suddenly explodes into action and the game finally shows its hand, and disc 4... is a final dungeon. I don't know what the consensus is, if people think the game goes downhill as the plot gets larger (as they do with VIII), but I really liked all the Terra stuff and thought they'd laid enough groundwork that it didn't come out of thin air.

I guess if you split the game into two halves, I'd probably still say I prefer the first two discs when you're still recruiting everyone and it's pretty much on rails. There's more variety to the gameplay here and I really loved the constant perspective shifts as you're travelling around the Mist Continent seeing what wild twist they'll come up with next to bring our gang to their knees. Despite things constantly going against the party it never felt boring or forced, unlike in some other entries, XIII. There's a lot of really good stuff later on of course, as said I like the Terra plot a lot, but outside of the core narrative I guess maybe the game feels a little more generic after that? You have your ship/airship, your whole party, sidequests, Chocobo riding etc but it's not as magical an experience (again I'm excluding the actual main plot, which stays great throughout).

Talking through my thoughts, I'm in two minds here. On the one hand Zidane and Dagger both get significantly more interesting over the course of Disc 3, going from pretty tropey characters to really interesting unique protagonists. On the other hand, pretty much everybody else falls by the wayside completely and the game feels less team-focused and more like a bunch of supporting characters standing around helping the leads. I'll talk more about the characters in particular later, but there were a number of threads I wish they had tugged at a little more to give everyone the complexity that I really feel they had the potential for. Also the last two continents do feel a little bare bones, you can see they were rushing to get it out by that point.

As for the world in general, they could've done more with the class issues that linger in the background early in the story but pretty much disappear later on. It's not nearly as egregious as Tactics where that's the game's primary focus at the start, but I guess it would've layered the world a bit more. But in general they do a great job with the worldbuilding, I'm amazed that they do the 'Brahne/Kuja destroys big city' thing on four separate occasions and yet it works every single time. That's a testament not just to the plot structure but to how they manage to make each location feel different for the player from the last. Burmecia's atmosphere with the rain and music is so hauntingly beautiful. Watching Cleyra just get completely obliterated 5 minutes after the gang decides 'right we're gonna stop it next time!' is great. Then Lindblum's fall is kicking Dagger when she's down, looking back it's of course setup for her breaking point with Alexandria but I somehow didn't see it coming. And just overall the background dialogue for the NPCs is good, they feel much more like legit background characters living their own lives and less like exposition machines as in more modern RPGs.

The CG cutscenes have aged much more poorly than the gorgeous static backgrounds, and the character designs work much better in model form than in cutscenes (the opposite of VIII's problem!). The quirky mix of animal-like creatures is much appreciated and suits the vibe of the art more than the pseudo-chibi humans, imo. Though I did get used to the humans' designs and do see the charm in them. The music is good, maybe not quite as good as VIII's, VI's or X's but I'd need to listen to the whole thing to be sure.

Most of these very minor complaints aren't even things I was thinking at the time, the game is paced so well that I really was just along for the ride from the word go. But yeah, this was just a stream of consciousness set of thoughts for me looking back at the game, I'll talk about the individual characters next time I post but I would like to thank everyone for following this topic and helping me, I hope you enjoyed it at least half as much as I have! I've never had a topic come this close to 500 posts before!

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Slowly becoming a Final Fantasy aficionado.
Currently playing: Final Fantasy IX!