What are you playing?

[PartridgeSenpai]

I'm still really in the mood for playing through JRPGs I'm already familiar with in Japanese, so after FFVI last weekend, this weekend I picked up FFIV on the PS1 to play through~. Mostly because Maru really likes it over FFVI, and it's been a decade since I last played FFIV and beat it, so I think it's really worth I give it another look.

I just rescued Rosa and am about to climb the mountain to go to the town with the Wind Crystal (I guess it's called Fuble? I have no recollection of what the English name is XP), and I've spent about 3 hours with the game so far. It really does show its age immediately. The PS1 port is apparently a quite faithful port of the SFC original, and it REALLY shows. Mostly in that the menus are hecking dreadfully clunky and hopelessly cluttered. Especially because there's no inventory sorting of any kind, all of your equipment and items share one massive thing, even equipping stuff is just a huge pain in the ass. (The Japanese original also has offensive items that are basically one-use free spells, as well as every status effect having its own curative item, so your inventory is CONSTANTLY full of shit compared to the English SNES port). The inventory clunkiness is definitely my #1 mechanical complaint so far.

Narrative and presentation-wise, it definitely shows its age too. It's kinda incredible, in a way, looking at a game like FFIV that dropped in 1991, and then looking at something like Far East of Eden Zero, and the staggering difference in power that developers were able to squeeze out of the SNES by 1995 (granted FEoEZ has some extra hardware in the cart helping that along, but I digress). The most immediately noticeable thing for me about the presentation is the lack of the cinematic elements that make later Square SNES games like FFVI and Chrono Trigger feel so alive. The sprites and movements in FFIV are much more simple, and while you can definitely see the building blocks in what cinematic elements are there that would lead to those later games, they are definitely lesser. Although something I can certainly say FFIV already has down to a science is the use of music to help carry the tone of a scene. One of the biggest problems Lufia II has, imo, is the lack of music changes to address a changing tone in a scene, and it's just neat to be reminded of how early on Square was implementing that kind of atmosphere in its storytelling.

The story is good so far, but definitely more straightforward and quite jarringly so at points. Like, for example, Rydia (the green haired summoner girl) meets the main character Cecil after he accidentally carries a box to her village full of Bomb enemies that burn it to the ground. Cecil also before that inadvertently kills her mother, and it takes a little while for her to trust him, and he has to carry her over a desert to safety and then kill a squad of guard to defend her for her to start trusting him. It's a really touching bit of storytelling that goes well with explaining your new addition to your party.

Then, conversely, you have how Rydia isn't learning any fire spells, and it's later explained that this is because she's still very understandably traumatized from her village being burned down in front of her eyes and everyone she knows getting burned alive. A quite naturally horribly traumatic experience for a child. How does she get over her traumatic fear of fire? Her friends ask her really nicely to be brave and burn down the ice blocks in front of them because otherwise the bad guys are gonna do more bad things because the party can't progress. It's a really jarringly shockingly hamfisted bit of storytelling around a topic the game has otherwise been okay about. Even the game's more detailed original Japanese script is more straightforward and moment-to-moment than FFVI, but sometimes I feel that's not so much to the game's benefit Xp

I'm enjoying the game so far, but I am definitely finding it inferior to FFVI so far. So far it feels more like a very solid book-end to 8-bit JRPGs, a game opening up the door to the next era, rather than a real next-gen game that easily stands toe-to-toe with Square's (and others') later JRPGs on the system.

[pierrot]

I picked up FFIV on the PS1 to play through~.

How are you able to stay sane with those load times for the menus?

Mainline Final Fantasy really peaked with FF III-J. FFs V, IX, XI, XII, and XIII end up feeling kind of like anomalies within a pretty lackluster brand.

[marurun]

Pierrot, I love that you are the Final Fantasy opposite of most of the folks on this board. Keep on keepin-on! I mostly agree with you.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I picked up FFIV on the PS1 to play through~.

How are you able to stay sane with those load times for the menus?

Mainline Final Fantasy really peaked with FF III-J. FFs V, IX, XI, XII, and XIII end up feeling kind of like anomalies within a pretty lackluster brand.

The load times are really okay other than for saving and loading. Making a save takes like one whole freakin' minute and that really starts to drain on you after a while

It's been too long since I've played through IX too. I really gotta give that a replay someday too.
I don't gel well with job systems, so I don't really care for III and V.
And I've never played XII and XIII. I'll have to someday though.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Well, after much troubleshooting and a second FFIV disc, I have come to the conclusion that the red laser in my PS3 must be going, because it went from a second copy of FFIV having identical crashing and music issues to the first, to the PS3 outright refusing to read PS1 games at all. I can even hear it changing lasers in the disc tray once it fails reading the first time. So this run of FFIV is dead forever, unfortunately. At least I only got a few hours in and not nearly to the end. More reason than ever to finally pick up a Japanese PS2 I suppose.

[pierrot]

More reason than ever to finally pick up a Japanese PS2 I suppose.

It's a pretty good investment, as long as you don't want to play Mystic Ark on it--.

I don't gel well with job systems, so I don't really care for III and V.

The job system pretty much is Final Fantasy, to me.

Pierrot, I love that you are the Final Fantasy opposite of most of the folks on this board. Keep on keepin-on! I mostly agree with you.

I appreciate it, maru. I actually started with FF IV, though. It was my first FF, and one of my first JRPGs. For a while it was the standard that I measured everything else by, but I mostly liked it for dumb kid reasons:

'You go to the moon. Best game EVAR!'

I do still kind of get why people would like it, though. More so than VI, anyway.

[Ack]

Since I beat KOTOR, I decided to go in a radically different direction. I'm now playing Betrayer, a first person stealth horror game set in an early Virginia colony sometime around 1600.

Something terrible has happened at this colony: feral Spanish soldiers guard the former English forts while firey spirits of Native tribes stalk the woods. I can also enter a shadow realm to speak with the spirits of dead English colonists, and most of them are murderers, rapists, suicides, and so forth. One woman sent another woman to burn as a heretic because her husband had cheated. In another case, a man buried his wife far from town after she killed herself so he wouldn't have the town priest badmouth her.

Meanwhile, the world is black, white, and red. The spirit realm is eternal night. The undead things that haunt it will suddenly burst forth from the ground, but you must go there to try and cleanse the corruption.

I'm enjoying it so far.

[isiolia]

I've had that game on Steam for years, but have yet to play it...which I guess is the case for many of the games I have on Steam.

[Ack]

It's gorgeous, and if you enjoy stealth and horror games, it's one to check out. Once you understand its rules, sneaking around and hunting your enemies gets a lot easier. There are also a few difficulty spikes, but they're generally not too bad. You should give it a try sometime.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I'm really liking how FFV does its storytelling. The myriad of optional, silly bits of story you can run into, either conversations between the party or just Bartz being a goofball, really humanize the characters in a way I enjoy. When FFVI does that, it tends to always be in the context of the greater narrative, but FFV tends to do it in the interest of just fleshing out the characters as people more. While I certainly think at least part of that is due to the limitations of a job system affecting how you can portray a character (like I've mentioned on here before), FFV's story is so far feeling like a different kind of good, where FFIV felt like a more vapid version of FFVI.

To me, FFV is a good companion piece, different very good game, when set aside FFVI, which is a nice change after FFIV felt like "FFVI but worse." I can definitely see why people like it so much and I'm really glad I went back and gave it this second shot~