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I loved FFVIII even though the story was pretty awful. If you boil it down it's like watching a bad episode of Muppet Babies where the muppets decide to off their nanny. On top of that you have the whole Rinoa is Ultimecia theory which is pretty drat convincing. I found it really dumb how almost everyone in that game you encounter is an orphan with maybe only 1 or 2 exceptions. The things I enjoyed were: The intro was loving epic! No other game comes close to that intro and it really sets the stage for something great. Combat was more engaging than in FFVII with the whole trigger thing. Junctioning did seem like a step backwards from materia but it wasn't a bad mechanic, it reminded me a lot of like equipping espers. The limit breaks were pretty sweet although very the system was very easily exploitable. The landing on Dollet was just drat cool. The musical score coupled with the fact that you were actually hitting the beach in a warzone was badass. FFVIII was amazing if you ignore the story.
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Oct 5, 2012 18:48
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Effectronica posted:FFVIII is really all about Squall though, and the point of Ultimecia coming out of nowhere only makes sense at the very end- Squall tells Edea to form an organization to fight Sorceresses, which leads to SeeD, which leads to the persecution of Sorceresses in the future, which leads to Ultimecia trying to achieve a world where she can live in peace, which leads to Squall telling Edea- Squall's entire life and existence are an unending loop, and Ultimecia and Squall are ultimately self-created entities, who then created the rest of the cast, bar perhaps Rinoa. Of course, this completely ignores Adel, but that's because FFVIII has a bad story.
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Oct 5, 2012 18:48
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FFVIII would have been even a mediocre game if it just stuck the Dollet mission in the first act of the game and kept with the military theme.
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Oct 5, 2012 19:07
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Momomo posted:Poor Freya. She could've been like, the coolest character in the game, but they ended up doing absolutely nothing with her. Instead that title goes to I dunno, Beatrix I guess. Steiner and Freya are my two favourite FFIX characters and probably Final Fantasy in general, but I couldn't say they're great characters. Both of them fall off the radar later on in the game. Steiner has some conclusion to his character arc. Freya has almost none. She spends the first two discs having a whole bunch of poo poo dropped on her. They could have made her vengeful or even insane. Having a cackling, laughing mad hero would have been very interesting.
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Oct 5, 2012 20:04
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Eggie posted:Steiner and Freya are my two favourite FFIX characters and probably Final Fantasy in general, but I couldn't say they're great characters. Both of them fall off the radar later on in the game. Steiner has some conclusion to his character arc. Freya has almost none. She spends the first two discs having a whole bunch of poo poo dropped on her. They could have made her vengeful or even insane. Having a cackling, laughing mad hero would have been very interesting. Steiner doesn't have a great character arc but he has a fully rounded one. He begins as a suspicious stick-in-the-mud and gradually grows friendly, more understand, less competitive and eventually falls in love and becomes a well-rounded individual. As far as Final Fantasy character development goes that's pretty good. Freya... uh. Well. She doesn't do much. She gets poo poo on a few times but never in a way that causes her any meaningful character change. She is obsessed with Fratley, finds out he has amnesia and... that's the end. At the end she's just hooked up with the amnesiac version of her boyfriend. It's not a character arc so much as it is a character speed bump. Final Fantasy V characters have more of a character arc than that.
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Oct 5, 2012 20:10
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ImpAtom posted:Steiner doesn't have a great character arc but he has a fully rounded one. He begins as a suspicious stick-in-the-mud and gradually grows friendly, more understand, less competitive and eventually falls in love and becomes a well-rounded individual. As far as Final Fantasy character development goes that's pretty good. With the exception of Auron, sensible, well-rounded characters seem to end up pretty boring. Freya has a pretty sad character arc all around, which is a shame since it had so much potential. Not many other characters has had as much bad stuff dumped on them - having your boyfriend disappear for 5 years, watching the near extinction of your race, finding out your boyfriend is alive only that he can't even remember who you are, and being saved by Blank and Marcus.
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Oct 5, 2012 21:09
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CloseFriend posted:I really don't like that the plot made Squall the indirect catalyst for everything major that happens in the entire world, since it undermines his entire character arc of learning not to think he's the loving center of the universe. Squall doesn't learn anything anyways- given a chance to go back in time and meet himself as a child, he's still just the same as he was at the beginning- all business, no time for Past Self. You'd think that if he'd learned anything, he'd have taken his younger self aside and talked to him for a bit, but nope, he just completes the loop and moves on. Oddly, those goddamned time-travel in the Laguna sequence where Ward loses his speaking voice seem to suggest that Ellone served to initiate Squall in being a creator-god and caused him to incorporate Rinoa and Adel into the loop as well, but the reactions of characters to the time-travel shenanigans and Ellone's own words speak against that, and they're clearly not trying to imply player-as-force-within-the-game like Earthbound does. Perhaps FFVIII just has a terrible story in more ways than one. 
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Oct 6, 2012 01:41
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ImpAtom posted:Here is the key to understanding FFXIII-2's plot. I found the easiest way to understand that game's plot was completely ignoring the "If you change the future, you change the past" line. That didn't make any sense and I don't remember anything like that happening, anyway. After that, it becomes pretty simple and dare I say, almost likable. ...Noel totally should've been Future Dahj, though.
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Oct 6, 2012 01:45
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The key to enjoying the story in 8 is to have a group of friends nearby to act out the lines in the most over the top dramatic fashion.
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Oct 6, 2012 01:59
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well, this is a thing: http://textsfromffxiii.tumblr.com/ 
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Oct 6, 2012 02:05
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Boten Anna posted:well, this is a thing: At last, worse writing than the actual writing of FFXIII. [e]: Oh god, thanks! Now all I can hear is her screechy voice:  "Sometoimes, Oi'm jeluss of [Adamantoise] be-cause thay ken just go to th-air 'omes whenever thay whant boi putting th-air 'eads in th-air bohdies"VVV Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 02:14
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Haha, wow that's horrible. Although you have to admit that sounds exactly like the kind of thing Vanille would say.
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Oct 6, 2012 02:17
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I've seen a bunch of those tumblrs. They take quotes from Texts from Last night or something and slap them on screenshots. Some of them are clever but most are pretty "Ehhh." Edit: Here it is https://www.textsfromlastnight.com
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Oct 6, 2012 02:21
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The GIG posted:I've seen a bunch of those tumblrs. They take quotes from Texts from Last night or something and slap them on screenshots. Some of them are clever but most are pretty "Ehhh." I guess I'm not jaded to the format, or at least this one at least does a good job of finding appropriate screenshots. 
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Oct 6, 2012 02:47
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Yeah, some of these are great because they pick the absolute best screenshots to go with the overlaid text. Most are pretty unfunny, low effort bullshit - or trying way too hard - but that shouldn't come as a surprise.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:16
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The GIG posted:The key to enjoying the story in 8 is to have a group of friends nearby to act out the lines in the most over the top dramatic fashion. While LPing the game, I repeated the line, "I don't want anyone talking about me in the past tense!", laughed for about five minutes, then marked it down as the worst FF dialogue line ever.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:28
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Azure_Horizon posted:While LPing the game, I repeated the line, "I don't want anyone talking about me in the past tense!", laughed for about five minutes, then marked it down as the worst FF dialogue line ever. The "Your name is Hope you give us Hope" speech is at least as bad, and it treats the audience like they are incapable of even basic deconstructive thought.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:34
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Azure_Horizon posted:While LPing the game, I repeated the line, "I don't want anyone talking about me in the past tense!", laughed for about five minutes, then marked it down as the worst FF dialogue line ever. Yeah, the NES/SNES translations hold way, way more no matter how hard you hate 8.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:48
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Defiance Industries posted:The "Your name is Hope you give us Hope" speech is at least as bad, and it treats the audience like they are incapable of even basic deconstructive thought. While that line is laughable, at least it makes sense in context. Squall's line kinda comes out of nowhere and is just unnecessarily angsty, like his whole characterization.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:49
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Azure_Horizon posted:While that line is laughable, at least it makes sense in context. It doesn't make it any less bad writing, regardless of how well it fits in context. But, yeah, I like to imagine that when Squall says the past tense line, he does it in the most shrill way possible. Defiance Industries posted:It treats the audience like they are incapable of even basic deconstructive thought. I think that can be said of 90% of XIII's writing in the first 30 hours or so. What's that game? Another five minute cutscene while Snow painfully tells me his motivation? Sure, it's not like I really took it in the first fifty times you told me. Not to trouble you, but maybe - if you have the time - you could have used one of those cutscenes to explain to me, that Cocoon is a loving Dyson sphere, and not leave me to wonder what the gently caress is happening with the setting. You know? Stuff that's kinda important if you want me to be invested in this world? Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 03:57
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I want VIII remade with modern tech just to see that scene with an actual voice actor.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:59
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Azure_Horizon posted:While that line is laughable, at least it makes sense in context. Squall's line kinda comes out of nowhere and is just unnecessarily angsty, like his whole characterization. It comes out of nowhere because it's telling us what happens when Squall spends time with other people outside of a direct mission-based context. Up until this point, the only socialization he has is either one-on-one, or else mission-oriented. When he's in a situation where people are just shooting the poo poo, he starts falling apart because his constructed self can't handle anything that isn't in a direct A to B line and he reverts to a sort of weepy childishness. In fact, one gets the sense that Quistis may be the only person Squall has social interaction with at the start of the game. Of course, Squall never matures beyond this, instead fixating on Rinoa and then reverting back to mission-orientation after he reaches the Ragnarok. So basically FFVIII is the story of how immaturity screws everything up forever and ever, because Ultimecia is, from what we get of her, essentially childish as well ("If you don't leave me alone, I'll blow up ALL OF TIME and sit and pout for eternity"), and her final rant is, like Squall's entire persona, a facade of adulthood. And neither of them will ever mature if the time loop is taken as symbolic of their lives. Admittedly, I doubt personally that any of this apart from "Squall is a hosed-up loner" ever went through the heads of the designers, because it's an unusually bleak tale as compared to the rest of the series. Maybe they were just too busy trying to achieve the right level of pandering with the Squall/Rinoa relationship to think about what the overall course of events implied. Or, again, stupid story from a Final Fantasy game, stop the presses.
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Oct 6, 2012 04:09
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They should pull a Chrono Cross and make a FF8-2 where they kill off all the protagonists in the first game. I have a feeling that would go over with people much better in FF8-2 than it did in CC.
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Oct 6, 2012 04:20
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Mega64 posted:They should pull a Chrono Cross and make a FF8-2 where they kill off all the protagonists in the first game. I have a feeling that would go over with people much better in FF8-2 than it did in CC. A lot of people say that FF8 would have been massively improved by having its focus be on Laguna and Friends instead of Squall and
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Oct 6, 2012 04:36
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They'd have to improve a few of those Laguna sequences, then. Some of them range from amazing to boring, much like Disc 1 of FF8.
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Oct 6, 2012 04:58
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Zombies' Downfall posted:It was kinda dogshit in Dragon Warrior 4 and yet here we are!!! Dragon Warrior 4's AI worked pretty well with a few exceptions (Cristo doing anything but healing) and on the SNES Dragon Quest 5 was fine-tuned/cheat enough that the AI didn't decide an action until that character's turn, leading to things like getting heals/revives immediately after dying in a way that you weren't going to forsee on your own. DQ6 felt like it was toned back some. ImpAtom posted:I am pretty sure they've said Lightning Returns is going to feature a bunch of costumes so I fully expect her to be wearing a schoolgirl outfit in that game before all is said and done. Or an Ultros outfit. The outfit is just Ultros wrapping around her body.  Vinchenz posted:K. So, just beat FFVIII and let me get this straight... No, this is all wrong. They try to kill Edea and fail. She kills Squall. The rest of the game and its rapid descent in to the depths of jRPG insanity is Squall's life and dreams flashing before his eyes in the moments before he's embraced by Death (and an impact with the pavement). It might be  as gently caress but it still makes more sense than the potentially real story. 
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Oct 6, 2012 05:12
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Azure_Horizon posted:While that line is laughable, at least it makes sense in context. Squall's line kinda comes out of nowhere and is just unnecessarily angsty, like his whole characterization. Squall's line is stupid, the Hope speech is stupid AND patronizing. If you have your characters explain basic poo poo like "I am wearing this red shirt because I am so angry all the time!" or "it's raining all of the sudden as a tragic event happened. I wonder if that's supposed to represent crying," your target audience should be head trauma patients who are having memory trouble. It's not about making sense, it's about not treating the audience like idiots. With the Squall line, he seems like an idiot, and the writers seem like idiots for thinking it's some kind of brilliant thing. With the Hope speech, the writers make it clear that they think you are a loving moron.
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Oct 6, 2012 09:48
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Defiance Industries posted:Squall's line is stupid, the Hope speech is stupid AND patronizing. If you have your characters explain basic poo poo like "I am wearing this red shirt because I am so angry all the time!" or "it's raining all of the sudden as a tragic event happened. I wonder if that's supposed to represent crying," your target audience should be head trauma patients who are having memory trouble. It's not about making sense, it's about not treating the audience like idiots.
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Oct 6, 2012 10:07
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Azure_Horizon posted:I'm left wondering how this is any different from FF8's plot assuming you are a loving moron the entire time you are playing it. We're talking about awful single lines, so that's really neither here nor there. FF8's incoherent mess of a plot seems to rely more on you not caring about things than anything, though.
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Oct 6, 2012 10:27
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Something I noticed playing through FF9 is EVERY FF game doesn't really have a coherent plot. Each one is kinda structured like anime where in one season you have a couple of plotlines that often have nothing to do with one another. Like FF9 was about Brahne, Then Kuja, Then Garland, each disc is almost a self contained story.
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Oct 6, 2012 11:39
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Well, Brahne at least leads into Kuja, who leads into Garland, who leads back into Kuja. Some of the connections are tenuous but there's still clearly a thread there, and Kuja is pretty much the villain from the moment he's introduced and it's made clear he's manipulating Brahne.
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Oct 6, 2012 11:41
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Endorph posted:Well, Brahne at least leads into Kuja, who leads into Garland, who leads back into Kuja. Some of the connections are tenuous but there's still clearly a thread there, and Kuja is pretty much the villain from the moment he's introduced and it's made clear he's manipulating Brahne. FFx's plot is pretty coherent, you know from minute one Sin has to be stopped somehow. FF12 is too, it just went so slow most people started to forget details. It's the least "anime" out of all the FFs in its plotting.
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Oct 6, 2012 11:43
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Mister Roboto posted:FF12 is too, it just went so slow most people started to forget details. It's the least "anime" out of all the FFs in its plotting. The problem I had with XII is the opposite of the problem I had with XIII - there are times where you'd spend so long wandering around a massive dungeon or field (or both), you'd forget what the hell you were doing, and who was what, and what your goal was. XIII keeps throwing unimportant poo poo at you that bogs down a somewhat servicable story, because they really wanted you to hear the same thing over twenty times, but phrased slightly differently.
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Oct 6, 2012 12:14
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Squall's line is more hilarious when you realize that the rest of the group hasn't been reading his inner monologue like us, so he's literally shouting that line in the middle of nowhere. Though I do prefer 'I dreamt I was a moron.' FF12 had the problem that if you wanted to do Hunts or sidequests as the plot progressed, you could literally spend hours before the next plot point. Even in its own dungeons you have that problem, like the Stilshrine of Miriam or the Pharos.
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Oct 6, 2012 12:17
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:Something I noticed playing through FF9 is EVERY FF game doesn't really have a coherent plot. Each one is kinda structured like anime where in one season you have a couple of plotlines that often have nothing to do with one another. Like FF9 was about Brahne, Then Kuja, Then Garland, each disc is almost a self contained story. Most of them, are pretty coherent for me, up till a point near the end. At least, most of them. VIII's is pretty okay, uptil the point it brings time-travel into it, or when the plot stops dead to force that "romance" on us, and then pretty much nothin can salvage it. IX is fairly solid until Memoria (for me), but then they have all that stuff with Necron who literally comes out of nowhere.
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Oct 6, 2012 12:45
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Pesky Splinter posted:XIII keeps throwing unimportant poo poo at you that bogs down a somewhat servicable story, because they really wanted you to hear the same thing over twenty times, but phrased slightly differently. Honestly, people probably wouldn't hate FF13 as much if they had simply cut 80% of the Lightning/Hope and Sazh/Vanille bullshit. Both their sets of chapters drag out way, way, way too loving long. There's entire chapters that are simply filler. Just have Lightning/Hope go straight to PalomPorom or whatever and Sazh/Vanille go straight to the Gold Saucer. Keep a section of a dungeon before arriving to the cities to keep those precious pretty graphics they spent so much time on, but don't make it an hour trip to go through the same loving dull-rear end poo poo. Yeah, you'd have to cut a lot of cutscenes, but most of it is meaningless fluff anyway, and it'd help a bit with the game's horrible pacing issues.
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Oct 6, 2012 12:48
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Mega64 posted:Cutting FFXIII I agree. And it's yet another thing, that wouldn't be an issue if SE got their act together while they were developing the game. The pacing is the single worst aspect of the whole thing, from where characters are introduced, to the cutscenes, to the areas - everything dictates the pacing. The best example being Space Pope. One cutscene about...an hour in? And then nothing more from him for twenty hours. Or the Team NORA chucklefucks, who are at the very start of the game, and then have to be reintroduced at the very very end, because you've forgoten who the hell they are. I remember the level I despising the most being the Fifth Ark. Because nothing is better than traversing through copy-pasted tunnels for an hour. Literally the only important scenes are; fighting Cid, and getting Fang's Eidolon. It also contains the best example of how loving dreadful XIII's pacing is; you fight Bahmut and get the Eidolon - fine. You then walk thirty steps where nothing happens, and are thrust into another cutscene where they find an airship to escape to Pulse - why not just make that one scene? They then board the airship, and less than a minute after getting it, it blows up forcing Fang to use her Eidolon. What it should have been was something like: Fang gets her Eidolon, and they see the airship in the distance = player gets to play around with it in a short section of dungeon as they make their way to the airship = they get to the airship and maybe have a minigame or something to play around with it = airship gets hit, Fang has to use her summon. There. It's like it was paced and edited by someone who literally has no clue how basic stories function. Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 17:03
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Then you have charming stuff like characters randomly coming back from the dead or flickering in and out of existence because the pre-rendered cutscenes no longer meshed with the rest of the game. That alone renders FFXIII's story inexcusable.
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Oct 6, 2012 17:13
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Why'd they even bother bringing Cid back to life in the first place? I realize they had the cutscene already made, but why make game content that contradicts this entirely? You could definitely create a position in which the party both fights Cid and he's killed as the new Space Pope.
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Oct 6, 2012 17:15
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Momomo posted:Why'd they even bother bringing Cid back to life in the first place? I realize they had the cutscene already made, but why make game content that contradicts this entirely? You could definitely create a position in which the party both fights Cid and he's killed as the new Space Pope. The answer to this is really simple and really stupid. Square-Enix made the expensive CGI cutscenes long before the game was finished. The developers were obligated to use the cutscenes. Cid is alive in a later cutscene and so he had to be alive for that cutscene to take place. That is also the reason Lightning's gravity device suddenly gets fixed. The gravity device was intended to be important in an earlier version of the game during which the CGI cutscenes were being made. It wasn't in the later part so it instantly gets broken after the CGI scenes where it is important and mysteriously fixed once it is necessary again.
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Oct 6, 2012 17:17
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