uwao, aooh! ragin’ and dancin’ through final fantasy 6

in recent times i’ve realized that i’ve become really, really bored with turn-based RPGs, so much so that the thought of taking on another one becomes rather disheartening. i’ve cast enough fir1, lit2, and cur3 spells to last me a lifetime. but final fantasy III for the SNES (a.k.a. final fantasy VI) is another one of those games that’s so universally praised that i knew i would have to play through it at some point, so despite not having finished FF2 (i.e. FF4) i finally forced myself to sit down and start in on it.

and it actually wasn’t so bad. in fact, i’d even say that the first half kept me reasonably well engaged. having avoided reading anything about the game the climactic event that occurs at the 1/2way point was fairly surprising and pretty notable. there were also a few distinctly memorable events, such as the opera scene and celes’ “leap of faith”. the characters are entertaining, and it’s interesting that each has his/her own special abilities, although rather too many of these specialized abilities are pretty much useless.

the second half was less interesting, however. this nostalgia-avoiding reminescence at gamespite.net puts most of the blame of the second half on the game’s espers mechanic, which enables any character to learn magic:

“[I]t’s hard to really care about the characters once you get so far into the game. Until the World of Ruin, the characters are all distinct in some manner, each with their own skills and the little bit of magic they’re able to learn. … the characters in Final Fantasy VI lack significant distinction as they all eventually become walking death-machines, each with the same magic. Their individual skills, so useful at the outset, are frankly useless in comparison. After a certain point, it’s just hard to care about making a unique team anymore; all of the characters’ original traits are soon destroyed by a broken magic system where anyone can learn anything.”

this is an interesting observation, but not my main complaint. the second half of the game has a somewhat interesting setup where your party is scattered to the winds and you have to find each person one by one and re-recruit him/her. but the bit-by-bit pacing gave the whole sequence a feeling of being just a series of sidequests rather than an actual story, especially since you’re revisiting previous locales. (although the world map’s geography changes, the towns are still pretty much the same.) the writer at gamespite likens this second half to an early version of a sandbox game, and comments that it feels “like a single-player MMORPG in a very empty world”. i’m not quite sure i agree with his assessment, although i do agree with his comment that “after a certain point in the World of Ruin, there’s really nothing left to do but grind for levels, items, rages, lores, and the errata that’s hard to find interesting as an adult.”

i also have some less-than-minor quibbles, such as how tedious it is to collect even a fraction of the rages/lores let alone all of them, and the fact that you have to use so many characters for the final dungeon that you probably never really would use otherwise (and as a result a number of them are probably significantly underlevelled). in the end this was an enjoyable game for an RPG (haha) and although it didn’t become a great favorite i have grown fond of most of the characters, particularly my main man gao as well as mog and umaro. i’m clearly never going to be a huge final fantasy fan, but after this experience i won’t mind playing through more of the main series. i’m definitely on the lookout for more-unique RPGs for the future though. hmmm … foreshadowing … … … ?

finally, final fantasy links. FF RPGs have a zillion links online, but here are a few of the more noteworthy ones:
- this is the FAQ that i found the most comprehensive and useful, although it’s rather bloated.
- pretty good game site at ffcompendium.com including a copy of the game script, lores and rages FAQs, and high-res images of the world maps
- another good game site at rpgclassics.com: has a ton of images, including enemy sprites
- entry at wikipedia
- endings at vgmuseum.com
- PDF of manual at replacementdocs.com

final fantasy tactics tackled

fiiiiinally finished the endless game i’ve been plodding my way through, final fantasy tactics for the original playstation. i’d been aware of the game ever since i began my obsession with the fire emblem series, and also b/c the follow-up on the GBA seems to regularly get mentioned in “top GBA games of all time” lists.

having been focused solely on fire emblem there were a lot of adjustments i had to make to playing FF tactics. there’s the isometric view, and the way the battle time advances took some getting used to since you have to constantly check the menus and time meters to see whose turn is coming up next and remind yourself of what commands the enemy has already entered in. one of the main differences between FE and FF tactics is that characters can die but aren’t permanently lost unless they miss three of their turns without being brought back to life. the other main difference is that the majority of your time is spent using “generic” characters who take no part in the story. (although you do get more unique, named characters with their own special abilities later, and eventually they can completely replace your original party if you choose.)

despite the learning curve in general i think my FE experience helped and i didn’t have much of a problem beating the game, although the game seemed to drag on and on. looking back it prob. didn’t take any more time than a FE game, but there were quite a few drawbacks that made the game a chore to finish. i agree with a lot of what the entry on wikipedia says:

Criticism is made on gameplay, plot and the localization effort. One of the reviews of RPGFan criticized the difficulty of the game as being inconsistent with each encounter against enemy units. The factors that influence the difficulty of the game include overpowered enemy units or party members, and time had to be taken to level up before any progress can be made. Though in-depth, IGN also noted that the game’s plot was confusing at times … The game’s localization effort was criticized by reviewers as poorly written, being rife with grammatical mistakes that almost stopped players from enjoying the storyline.

of those complaints, the main one for me was that the story is so lousy. half the time i didn’t really know who was doing what to whom, nor did i ever care. on top of that the localization is one of the absolute worst i’ve ever encountered with tons of awkward as well as flat-out incorrect writing, which is a major problem for a text-heavy RPG. as for the level grinding, this wasn’t too much of a problem and i sort of expected it since the game has a fair amount of emphasis on random battles (unlike almost all the FE games where there are no random battles). the main exception to my general feeling that the amount of level grinding is tolerable is that at one point about halfway through i inadvertently overlevelled the main character, ramza, and everyone else in my party was way underlevelled in comparison. i hadn’t realized that random encounters base the enemies’ stats on your most powerful character, so i was pretty much screwed fighting stupidly tough random battles until i was able to bring the rest of the party up to ramza’s level. one other thing that annoyed me was that unlike FE you don’t get to preview the map before you start it, so you can’t adjust your equipment or characters at all. even setting the start positions of your characters is a virtually completely blind process.

quite a number of complaints, but as for the good stuff the graphics, although more cartoon-y than i’m used to, are generally well done, with great character design, pretty good environments, and some great battle effects. the gameplay is pretty solid, although i was surprised that the central game mechanic isn’t the battle system so much as the game’s character class system, which is robust and well designed. basically every generic character starts off as either a squire or a chemist. after you reach a certain level you can then change class (a squire can become a knight or an archer and a chemist can become a priest or a wizard). after you reach a certain level in those classes you can change to even more advanced classes. this built-in progression of classes keeps the game feeling fresh, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment with the different classes and combine the abilities of the various classes, although some of the classes and their abilities def. seem like useless padding. there are also a ton of other extra game elements that i didn’t bother getting into b/c they just seemed useless, namely the “propositions” in which you send some of your party away for some time to fulfill missions that you don’t monitor at all and get only paltry rewards for completing; the monster recruitment where you can get monsters to join your party but who don’t change classes and generally don’t have many useful abilities; and the monster “poaching” where you can sell monsters you’ve killed for special items. there are also two lengthy sidequests (the deep dungeon and the quest to get cloud from FFVII) that i had absolutely no interest in embarking upon.

phew! even though i’m ecstatic that i can finally stop playing this game the game was actually pretty good overall; a better story would’ve been a major improvement. i’ll keep the GBA FF tactics on my list of games to play, although from what i’ve read it doesn’t sound like there’s much of a story there either so it’ll prob. be quite some time before i try it out. may try one of the tactics ogre games instead.

finally! some fantastically tactical links:
- battle mechanics guide: indispensible reference for the underlying equations for the game engine
- great fan site at squarehaven.com with tons of great stuff, inc. a great guide to all the jobs, the full script, and official jobs artwork and summons artwork.
- pretty good general FAQ: with class info, battle strategies, and more
- another good FAQ
- youtube video of the main parts of the cloud sidequest
- useful FAQ on what the brave and faith stats do

i choose you, yellow pikachu

one of the gadgets i was excited (yes, i know how geeky that sounds) — ahem — i was excited to get for my gamecube was the game boy player. (btw, can someone please explain to me why it’s “game boy” (w/ a space), but “gamecube” (no space)? unless there’s some sort of verbal command implied by the former name brand (“name brand” has a space, btw), it makes more sense to me as one word.) anyway, like the super game boy this device enables you to play game boy games (in this case, also game boy advance games) on your TV.

anyway, one of the first games i’ve been playing (other than the legend of zelda: link’s awakening) has been pokemon: yellow version. to be honest the whole pokemon obsession, as i’m sure for most people over the age of 10, had stayed pretty much in my distant peripheral view. i can directly point to the one game that changed all that: super smash bros. melee. i won’t go into that too much since this post is already getting ridiculously long, but the game is a classic for a reason, and nintendo scored a major coup in highlighting all the various characters of their franchise and breathing life into the less well known ones. the game got me scurrying to track down the games all the characters appear in, and making my wishlist grow about tenfold. although next on my list is the metroid and the earthbound (a.k.a. mother in japan, from whence the character ness comes) series, the wide variety of pokemon used in smash bros. piqued my interest the most.

it took a few moments to figure out the difference between all the different pokemon versions, and i don’t have the entire series mapped out in my head yet, but the basics for the first three games are that pokemon red and blue came out in the US at the same time and were designed so that some pokemon could only be obtained in one or the other of the games and thus would require a friend with the opposite game to trade you. pokemon yellow came out a bit later and featured enhanced graphics (although keep in mind this is “enhanced” for the game boy), slightly different game details (e.g. locations of the various pokemon), and a storyline more based on what had become a hit TV series. i ended up getting the yellow version even though i’m still planning on playing through the other two versions, although in retrospect i should’ve started with them. but i just happened to win this one off of ebay first.

phew! with that all said i can finally get around to talking about the game. i was surprised at how much this game is like the NES final fantasy. like the SNES game earthbound the game does a great job of doing a completely modern-day RPG. in earthbound the hero uses such weapons as a baseball bat and a yo-yo. in this the battles are all between pokemon, monsters you capture and train (through battles) and teach increasingly powerful techniques to. the battle scenes are highly reminescent of the orig. final fantasy, but other elements have the same feel to me as well.

i think i’m a little less than halfway through. the games has proven to be addictive, although as with final fantasy the battles do get a bit repetitive. much less so in this game though b/c instead of 4 characters you have 6 that you’re constantly rotating and most that evolve. as someone pointed out, yes you could just stick to the same 6 or so to beat the game (which hasn’t been very hard so far), but the fun is seeing what moves each pokemon has and can learn and seeing them whoop @$$ in battle. as cheesy as it is to say so, you really do find yourself wanting to “catch ‘em all”. the designers did a great job giving each pokemon a different look, identity, and name, and as the first installment in the franchise it has def. been worth playing. i’m constantly amazed at how much stuff programmers were able to pack into these early classics, and as usual the simplicity is deeply satisfying. like some good tosci’s ice cream.

ign.com, as usual, has the most attractive guide around. i’ve been purposely refraining from reading too much of it though. after i finish the game i’ll def. be going back and poring over the guide more thoroughly … and getting the next game!