Final Fantasy 11 (2004, Square)

Final Fantasy 11

I did not play this game.

I do not play online MMOs. Especially not ones that I have to pay for. I did, for a bit, with the Matrix Online, because it was the Matrix, and I still think that the Matrix is cool, but overall, I do not agree with having to pay for a game, a thing to run the game on, and then a monthly charge to play the game you own. I also am a pretty antisocial gamer. I have trouble enough making friends in the real world, but now you’re saying I have to make online friends in order to be capable of getting together with people to do some quest that I physically cannot do on my own? Lame. Especially since I cannot guarantee that I’ll be able to play at any given time. /rant

The way that I would have improved this game, based on the fact that I didn’t play it and completely and viscerally disagree with MMO style game play is to not call it a number in the series. They should have called it Final Fantasy Online and had it be a separate entity from my beloved Final Fantasy Series.

Anything else to do with the game, I cannot comment on, because, like I said, I never played it.

Final Fantasy 10 (2001: Square)

In Context

While I wasn’t living with my boyfriend when FF10 came out (and no, I don’t feel like using Roman numerals, thank you), I was spending about ½ the week at his house.  He, I and his roommate were all playing this game at the same time.  It’s actually where my rule “more than 1 person in the house cannot play the same game at the same time” comes from.  Too much Blitzball makes relationships suffer. 

The 3 of us really enjoyed playing this game, even with the multiple playthroughs going on in the house at the same time, and to this day it ranks pretty high on my Fun To Play list. 

Final Fantasy 9 (2000: Squaresoft)

In Context

I played Final Fantasy 9 when it came out.  I’d just come off of the awesomeness that is FF6, and it was following FF8, which received a lot of backlash due to its Final Scifi theme.  So for this one, Square went back to the drawing board, or at least, they tried.  They focused more on the Fantasy aspect of Final Fantasy (a good idea), and went back to feudal times.  Rock, right?  Um.

This was an interesting time in my life.  I was in college, therefore had way too much, and yet never enough free time.  I was learning Japanese as my foreign language and was interested in All Things Japan.  (I grew out of this, I promise—much less obsessed with things, promise, I didn’t just buy tickets to the So You Think You Can Dance Tour, really…. I call it “phasing” now….)  So at the time I viewed this game through a different lens than I do looking back on it now. 

At the time, I was disappointed with the game.  I finished it.  I beat the heck out of it.  I got all of my characters up to level 99, I had all of the blue magic, I PWNED that game.  But, it wasn’t as satisfying as playing either of the previous games I played, and I haven’t gone back and played it through more than once (I did try a second time, much later, but didn’t finish).  At the time, I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t like it as much, now, I think I can make a better stab at it.

Final Fantasy 6 (1994 Square)

In Context

After playing Final Fantasy 8 I moved back a bit to play Final Fantasy 6.  FF6 was originally released in Japan as FF6, but since they skipped some when porting them to the US, most people played this game originally as FF3 in the SNES.  I played the Playstation 1 re-release.  And coming off of the beautiful, revolutionary graphics in FF8, it was a bit hard to go backwards to a 16bit game, but the game itself was so awesome that it was easy to overlook the graphics.