Final Fantasy 10-2 (Square: 2001)

Can I just mention how much I am upset at this game?  Mostly because it was the first game that I’d ever played, the first long game with a story that I have ever played, that I didn’t finish.  I am a completionist.  I like to complete games.  I like to collect as much of the cool stuff that I can and beat every boss, including the hidden ones, and get through the whole game.  I do it with books too—it takes a lot for me to not finish a book.  But this game was horrible and forever hurts me, because it was my first.  It was my first failure.  I let this game beat me, and that makes me sad.  

In Context
I, like many FF fans, eagerly awaited the next Final Fantasy after 10, only to be told that the next game would be an online only game.  My feelings on Final Fantasy 11 being what they are, needless to say, in my disappointment, I threw my passion for FF into the only game that was available to me, FF10-2.  

In looking forward to this game, I watched the behind the scenes and the previews, and the thing that sticks most starkly in my memory is how the entire point of the game was to love the dress sphere transformations.  If you didn’t like them, you missed the point of the game.  

So wait, the entire point of the game is Sailor Moon-like naked transformation sequences.  Yep, this game was nothing but fanservice.  

But, you can’t just have a game based on fanservice, can you?  And besides, what about the girls, like me, who played this game?  Where’s the fanservice for us?  Granted, I was on the way out of my Sailor Moon binge of the 90s, and transforming and having cool super powers still did have a bit of draw, but the entire game seemed a bit too young for me.  As if, for the first time, I was not their target demographic.  Which struck me as odd, because the NES and SNES FFs were “fun for all ages.”  They had elements that appealed to smaller children, as well as seasoned adults.  Why drop the ball down to the Team Rocket level, like they did on this one?

The Plot
Yuna, from the previous game, lost her boyfriend due to his non-existence, not to mention her religion, and is seeking throughout the world, trying to find herself.  And her boyfriend.  But that doesn’t come up as much as you think it should.  Or at least not as blatantly.  Not to mention if you don’t play through the game perfectly, you won’t get that ending where you reunite with him.  And I mean, 100% perfect.  

She is joined by Rikku (from the last game) and Payne (not from anywhere, but because we needed someone to connect to the goth/punk/emo audience).  They find dress spheres and get into Shenanigans.  There is a comic-relief “bad guy” (in quotes because of the complete ineptitude).

The Main Conflict
No, not in the plot (PWP?), but that I had with this game.  Why did this game even exist?  Why, when you have a solid, long, and good game history, do you feel the need to continue a story that had ending and resolution.  Crappy and trite resolution, but resolution all the same.  To add the extra chapter to the story weakens the story as a whole.  It’s like the Star Wars prequels.  Yes, the story was kinda interesting, but knowing what I know about Darth Vader’s past, and *shudder* midichlorians, weakens the story of Star Wars, and weakens my love for my favorite childhood story.  (Also, http://www.supershadow.com/starwars/midi.html, you’re count is BS.  There’s no way that Han survived all that and was that weak in the force.  I don’t care what the books said.  That’s why midicholrians are Bull.  Quit trying to explain awesome.)

Characters
Yuna, by her stereotype, is a weak character.  She is suppose to be the Japanese fanboys’ dream. She is quietly strong, but demur, and her main thing that she needs is her man.  In this game they attempt to make her stronger, and give her purpose, but her purpose changes from religious quest to “finding herself.”  She could have used this medium to become a much stronger character, but she just doesn’t. She tries, and fails.

Rikku is the bouncy character. I liked her in FF10 because she was the thief, and I like getting things for free in my games, so bonus there, but due to the complete change in gameplay, this quality goes away.  What’s left is a bouncy, hyperactive, highpitched girl who is nothing but support for Yuna’s journey. Yes, she is a side character. That doesn’t mean that that needs to be her sole character description. Everything else about her is how she acts, but not who she is.  This makes her weak.

Payne. I wanna say that Payne had something to do with the story--that her backstory had something to do with the story as a whole, which I understand as she’s new to the plot and needs to have a reason to be there.  However, I think it would have been a stronger story to use the well (or at least better) established characters already established in the universe. They could have used this established character to bring in a new character, if thats what you really wanted to do, but centering a story that is a continuation of an established story by using a completely new character just makes me not care about your new character,or your new story.

The Team Rocket Villans.  I’m not going to talk about them more than to say they were weak and shouldn’t have been there.  Dude, I can’t even remember their names.

Gameplay
As I said, the whole point of this game is the dress spheres.  And they were kinda cool.  For about an hour. Then it just became a bit tedious. The rest of the play, outside of fights, was your typical PS2 RPG outside of fights. Meaning you couldn’t really do a whole lot except for walk around in predetermined areas. Oh, and I think you could climb in this game. Revolutionary. Not like you couldn’t jump in any games previously. Like Super Mario Bros.

And Now We Get To The Real Problem With This Game
There’s not really much else to say.  And that’s the problem. Positive or negative the whole thing was kinda meh.
You know what?  This whole thing felt like badly written fanfic. You have established characters and an established world, with a new character thrown in to propel the plot to this sequel.  Tell me that’s not a fanfic.

In Conclusion
This game just shouldn’t have been made.

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.

Final Fantasy 8 (1999: Square)

Plot Summary

The main story follows Squall as he graduates from school, joins the army, slowly recovers his memories from his childhood, falls in love, and saves the world from an evil witch, but not the one you think it is.

The side plots include the story how Squall’s father, Laguna (a soldier), and Rinoa (Squall’s love interest)’s mother, Julia never get together and how he ends up in a small town and gets a girl (Raine) pregnant before leaving her to be the head of a weird commune of lion creatures.  There’s also the story of the almost main baddie, Edea, who gets (I think) controlled by an uberwitch from the end of time into abandoning her wards at the orphanage (where all of the main characters grew up), and her husband to Take Over The World!

The Final Fantasy Series--An Introduction

Final Fantasy was originally created as a last game for a game company to produce before they went under.  Hence the “final” in the title.  It is toted on Square Enix’s website as “The best selling RPG series in the world!” http://www.square-enix.com/na/title/finalfantasy/ And there is cause for that.  It has spawned 14 numbers in the series, not including spin offs, sequels, and even a couple of movies.  It’s a big deal.  But oh, have they gone wrong in recent, and in not so recent, years. 

The series as a whole has a really interesting premise.  Each installment in the series is an entirely new world that is facing a “final” crisis.  This is a double edged sword.  On the one hand, each installment has the ability to be epic! because you’re not building up from the last epic battle—it's a new world with new problems.  You don’t have sequelitis (usually) where uber crazy things have happened to these characters and keeps happening to these characters game after game.  Which is a good thing.

On the other hand, this means that in each new number in the series, the creators have to come up with a completely new world, new characters, new story, a new magic system, and a new thing to keep you interested in playing for 70+ hours (most of my games lasted from 90-120 hours total, not counting multiple playthroughs).  That takes a lot of work, a lot of ingenuity, as well as a lot of luck in guessing what you think your audience will like, seeing how you can’t bring over a bunch of things from the last game like most series (*cough* God of War *cough*)