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I think the shift to the PS1 meant that the music needed to serve different things compared to the 16 bit era. While it still doesn't have the same "tailored to a specific scene" like a movie score does, there's a much wider variety in tracks and it tends to be a bit more background, with the stand out tunes being the ones that underscore a specific thing where you want the music to come to the foreground.

Markies wrote:

Raging Justice wrote:I frequently see people cite FF IX as the best of the original Playstation entries even though VII is the most popular.

Out of the PS1 versions, I would say IX is probably my favorite. I think VIII is great at being experimental and unique

I'm kind of amazed at some of the things people have discovered in that game. I think it's the only Final Fantasy where it is possible to manipulate RNG to do exactly what you want it to do. The card game was really cool and fun too. The game has problems, but I like it as a game where you can really experiment and play around with its systems. It's kind of like how I view FF XIII as a garbage game in many respects, but I find the combat system really interesting. Some FF games have more to offer in game play than story/characters.

You can stepcount to control encounters all the way up to at least FFVII, and FF1's encounter tables are completely fixed (the RNG counter doesn't increment except when a battle is fought).

I am perpetually surprised the FF games are even functional software given what we learn about some of the underlying bits that make them up.

MrPopo wrote:You can stepcount to control encounters all the way up to at least FFVII, and FF1's encounter tables are completely fixed (the RNG counter doesn't increment except when a battle is fought).

Yeah, I think FFVIII has that as well. There's also various aspects of the card game that can be controlled despite being seemingly random. FFVIII is a game that can be broken in many ways and all of that stuff still works in the remastered version

Getting really tired of FFIX's dungeon designs. The CG backgrounds make it hard to figure out where you can go or where you should go, as the extra "detail" is generally low-res enough that it all ends up getting a bit muddy, and because most layouts are on the diagonal but those diagonals are mapped to the dpad's cardinals, it can sometimes be guesswork which way to push to go where you want. The lack of support for analog on the modern remakes only makes that worse. Despite this, I'm still mostly enjoying the game.

Making some progress in FFIX again after a long hiatus over the holidays. I'm at Mt. Gulug, and while I love having a familiar tune I'm not completely sold on the orchestration. Still, it's a nice callback to early FF games and I appreciate it. It also means I'm approaching what would be the end of Disc 3. I did take some time to do all the Chocobo Hot Cold that I could prior to disc 4. I do still have more frogs to catch, however.

Dang, you did take a break. Good on you for getting back on the horse, Maru.

I know this tends to be a retro gaming forum, but I've spent a ton of time in Elden Ring lately and I would like to talk about how awesome it is.

Elden Ring is pretty awesome, folks.

We've never made current games off-limits. Share your love!