Love having all my party members twiddling their thumbs defending and healing while one guy fails his steal rolls 10 times in a row
I extra love it if the steal move deals damage so you have to also worry about the target dying from too many failed attempts
I double extra love it when it’s a boss battle when on top of everything else the story momentum just grinds to a halt while you fuck with a stupid RNG for 5 minutes
9 has that in spades.
One thing that frustrated me with FFs starting at 12 was relative improvement to combat coming at the expense of more and more story beats. 15 was the worst offender, but it was all downhill after 10.
I don’t understand. You’re saying 12 improved combat at the expense of its story? And that 15 did that too? But 12’s an autobattler that’s all about political intrigue and 15’s so trivial that it might as well be an autobattler (its story is a mess though, I agree).
The gambit system was significantly more involved and allowed combat to proceed in near real time. Very stark change from 10.
Also, 12 had political intrigue as a backdrop, but it was all on rails. This wasn’t Crusader Kings. Nothing you did influenced the outcome.
It ended up being button mashing in practice. But you had more real time control over the character than in any prior version. Much closer to a Zelda style of combat than a traditional FF.
The shift in gameplay was so stark they basically never finished the story. By the time you’re in the third act, you can practically see the stage hands pulling ropes in the background. The dramatic, expansive open world they lay out in Act 1 collapsed into a few repetitive hallways and clumsy boss battles by the end.
All that so you could do a half assed implementation of Kingdom Hearts.
They even released a movie and an anime series to do world building! And it all got flushed down the drain by the end.
12 is linear with only one ending yeah, but its politics are remarkably grounded and well-integrated into its world. It’s light on the crystal, magic, divinity stuff and heavy on the geopolitical. Out of all the FF games, Ivalice is the setting that’s the most thought through imo.
Regarding 15, it’s funny how the combat mechanics are most relevant in comrades where targeting weak points to break them actually matters. And this might just be how I played the game, but I didn’t mind the shift toward the end. I got my fill of wandering, camping and questing before I set sail so the oppressive hallways came off as a purposeful artistic choice to set the tone. Like, the road trip has ended, the boys are in enemy territory, they’re being obviously manipulated by Ardyn, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The miserable way the boys are restrained into realizing the worst ending feels thematic.
The OVA and movie came out before the game released, didn’t they? I’ll admit, I liked them but I’m also a massive FFXV fan so that might be apologia.
I haven’t played it but I struggle to imagine how it could be worse than FF13, a game that was nothing but a bunch of cutscenes strung along by narrow corridors
Give me my guy running around on a big globe map representation of the game world or give me death
For all its sins, FF13 was a complete story that closed its loops. Not a great story, but it at least had FF vibes and a dramatic ending.
FF15 just kinda gives up on itself in the middle of the game. You can tell the developers were throwing up their hands and announcing “We don’t care anymore, just send it out the door”.
A ton of story beats are littered across the first arc that just get dropped. A bunch of story beats are introduced at the top of the third arc seemingly so they can immediately be resolved.
The Act 2 final fight feels like someone cobbled together a God Of War quick time fight over a long weekend.
FF13 is consistently mid from end to end. FF15 drops straight off a cliff once you leave the main continent.
Old ways are best ways
I know I say this like every time it’s brought up, but I will reiterate yet again: FF13 is the ideal JRPG to play while drunk. The out-of-combat mechanics are “Hallway Simulator 2009.” The in-combat mechanics are “mash these three buttons in this sequence, unless it’s this slightly more annoying type of encounter, then use this other sequence instead.” The rest of it is forgettable cutscenes where Snow yells a lot over his shitty nu-metal leitmotif, and the story is so incoherent that it wouldn’t matter if you were sober anyway. Some people drink to forget; if you’re playing FF13, you drink to not remember in the first place, and it’s a better experience for it.
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