Best Final Fantasy poll !!

i always seemed to find X and X-2 way more enchanting than most other fans

with X i think it was a combination of a few things wrt the combat that really clicked with me (true turn-based + extremely rapid battles = perfect 2 me) plus having cut scenes with actual voice acting makes a story-based game way more immersive imo, plus having non-static environments - it all just felt refreshing at the time

X-2 also felt refreshing just by dint of not taking itself very seriously plus i thought it was cool that it was female-centric instead of being another brofest - i think i remember tombot dismissing it as fanfiction at the time but 2 me that feeling of being unafraid to be trivial struck me as somehow brave in the context of the genre

oh and X-2 had the best combat system

yeah i recall the junction system being laboured & limiting but that cld be my own bias talking. also i havent played that game since i was ~15

i mean i liked the non-intuitive xp system in ii, which is cleverly cruel but its really simple - you get better & the things you do consistently & lose capability w/ the skills you dont so you always have to make real choices abt what your characters are doing - whereas all viii did was make stat maxing more complicated

i liked x-2 on release but im such a sucker for class changes & the sandbox-y nature of it was a fun departure. but i think its kinda ugly or least really dated looking now

i generally have low standards when it comes to graphics, and i haven't played it since it came out, but i bet i'd still find it easier on the eyes than FF7

whereas all viii did was make stat maxing more complicated

yeah i'd say this is otm

FF5 is my fav in terms of overall gameplay. Love the class system!

materia still the best magic system ever. just such a constant pleasure to level up in vii, kinda gives me a glimpse into that super otaku world of dudes who kill time dungeon grinding in like Megami Tensai or whatever

p terrible that V didnt get any votes shits p tite imo

feel like this really does deserve consideration as the best final fantasy

the real qn tho is should i continue playing them in order or skip to 6 and 7 and go on to 8

tbh my predominant memory of ff5 is grinding the basement of galuf's castle w/lv5 death to get mad AP. which is a tedious memory

though its still a p good game!

i say play it

in order

yeah ive played through every ff game this year in order although i raced through iv on a rom version cuz i dont really like it very much & didnt really fuck w/ any sidequests or even trying to level. but ive spent crazy hours on vi and vii already so im tempted to

v has a lot of grinding but i think it generally 'interesting' grinding. i mean it even gives you time mage spells to facilitate grinding! also i think part of the challenge of the game is finding ways of quickly accruing ap (esp in hard-to-grind jobs like bard), which is kinda neat to me. but i think the best part is that there are multiple objectives that you can work on simultaneously while grinding a handful of which have real in-game value.

hey are any of those fuckin dissidia games worth the trouble?

i tried a 4-class run of FFV last year and i had to quit around 2/3rds of the way through. god it was boring.

yeah i think trying a single class challenge run p severely mistakes what makes this game good

how are people playing FFV, is there an alternative to the GBA version?

roms

also PSN/Wii VC releases are coming soon (i own the lousy ps1 anthology, too)

the ps1 version is truly horrible

im playing the gba version on an emulator because i want to try the bonus dungeon/classes

one of the things that i think i liked best about ffv is that it very rarely interrupted my attempts to more efficiently make #s go up w/ bullshit story stuff. getting kinda annoyed w/ ffvi and all its stupid plot twists

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/07/final-fantasy-is-dead/

surprised that IX didn't get any votes. if/when i replay a final fantasy game, it's probably going to be my first choice.

i stopped with 8, but i'll probably finally play X when the HD remaster comes out in a couple months

you shouldn't skip IX! it didn't break new ground, but it wasn't trying to, either. iirc they were pretty transparent about their intentions to make it a amalgamation of the most beloved qualities of the previous entries in the series. it wasn't perfect by any means, but it plays like comfort food.

haven't played any of these since IX but X-2 looked so goofy that I was pretty tempted

I've heard it's fun it you just accept that it's super light and goofy (unlike most FFs)

re: IX, it's REALLY hard to go back to 3D PS1-era games

X-2 intro movie is either the worst thing ever and/or pure genius. The game is decent (if stupid) as long as you don't go for 100%.

the combat in IX is slow as a glacier. X-2 has best battle system of any FF game

yeah ix feels like it doesn't really have a game attached to it

Its cool that you can play up to FF6 on your phone now

http://www.novacrystallis.com/2013/10/square-enix-has-formed-a-final-fantasy-committee-to-ensure-series-quality/

I read this as an attempt at deposing Nomura.

I've played/replayed a couple of these in the past 5 years and I am sure my ordering is not even close to what it was then

Nhex OTM when he said I put IV too low, that one holds up.

big whale bros

The Lightning Returns ending has leaked, and it's ridiculous.

Spoilers, in case anyone cares about the Lightning Saga
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Lightning creates our Earth, moves to France.

hahah wow

I've played through X, and I'm at the Zanarkand ruins at the end of the game, but I am rapidly losing interesting. I think much of it has to do with just deciding to play through these FF games one after the other and getting burnt out. Another reason is that I picked Expert Sphere Grid and listening to everyone who said it was really secretly an incredibly linear leveling thing that only LOOKS confusing. Now I am fighting monsters that have Aga spells and none of my characters have an Aga spell or is anywhere close. Well the closest one is Rikku, so I'm grinding (thank God PCSX2 for FF) and having her get the Aga spells and then I guess I can use the 2 black magic spheres i have to give some of those to Lulu? I think I really screwed up, I guess I deserve it for picking EXPERT SPHERE GRID but then again the game clock is over 60 hours. Ugh. The leveling system from VIII made more sense than this.

Also, to hell with Blitzball. A mini-game that locks you into playing for a minimum of 10 minute stretches, where for MOST of that time you have absolutely no control over what is going on. No control over your defense! Where's my Triple Triad cards, again....? It's a shame because the battle system in this game is definitely the best of all of them.

The English voice acting is pretty bad, Auron, Yuna, and Lulu aside. The guy doing Seymour's (the big bad guy) voice just sounds like a computer programmer or maybe a college-age barista or something. Tidus is insufferable. Every single line he speaks sounds like he's whining whether he's whining or not.

never heard of Expert Sphere Grid, you must be playing the PAL version

FFX is actually my top ff game but im in the minority w/that opinion

haha yeah uh wow

the expert sphere grid is like, nominally you could spec your characters way more have-it-your-way instead of having x guy be good at y monster. it seems like, the game being balanced the way it is, there's little point except for voluntary challenges? like if you wanted to do it with a three-person party, or something.

i found the idea of spending points just to move on that grid (rather than to activate things) really frustrating and broken? or if not broken, i don't know -- what i mean is, it left me paralysed with indecision in case afterwards i faced some kind of buyer's remorse

Well, yeah, ideally that would be cool. The thing is, I didn't spend enough time looking at the whole sphere whenever I leveled up, so now many characters have ended up tracing over each other's paths, and to get a spell like Ultima (that I would just HAVE at 60hours in any other FF game) I need to save up 20 or 30 S.Levels because the good spells are on the far side of the grid and my characters are all swarming over each other, gaining MP and HP but not any useful spells.

Is the normal sphere grid idiot-proof? My next playthrough (definitely w Japanese voices) I'll probably use it. I'd rate it above VIII (but below VII and VI) just because the battle system is so great.

It sort of sucks that the battle system is so cool, you really want to use all the characters, but yeah maybe just doing a Wakka/Yuna/Lulu game would be fun on it's own.

I've been playing Final Fantasy X again, and loving it.

POWER LEVEL LIKE NEVER BEFORE W THIS ONE NEAT TRICK
press the TRIANGLE button during combat to quickly skip a turn

This time through FFX it's on a Japanese-voiced copy, which matches the mouth movements more and is far less grating than the English dub (though that one is still charming in its way). I'm also playing it mostly in original resolution on PCSX2, with Blend tff interlacing for a nice CRT-like fuzziness. First off the music in this game is incredible. Some of the main themes, the first time I heard them, sounded like something from an old movie or something that I heard years ago. Secondly the combat is AMAZING, definitely the best in the entire series. It is incredibly fast, from everything like the menus popping up on the screen to the latency between you choosing an action and the character performing it. At some points you can input the next move WHILE the current character is attacking. The turn-based system is brilliant and simple and capable of some deep chess-like strategy.

At the moment I am power-leveling in Thunder Plains. I'd like to stay here all week but we'll see if I get bored or not.

This dodging lightning thing is such a massive troll on FF players. Has anyone here done it 200 times?

And now Lulu has -aga spells, pretty sure I'm done power leveling here =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HbIHVoTY2M

I'm at the very end of the game now, just got the airship back, and I am going to take my sweet time before killing Sin to do a bunch of sidequests. Monster Arena seems like good kleptomania fun. But i haven't played a single game of blitzball and I don't intend on doing so. It looks like I'll only be missing out on upgrades for Wakka, who is one of my least favorite characters anyways, so whatever...

Some short reviews of the FF games I've played so far:

Final Fantasy I - Great game! It's kind of amazing how much of FF is all laid out in this first game. Fighting is super slow though. Wwhen u fight 6 bad guys and they all attack and you have to wait for each one to hit, you may fall asleep before it's your turn.
Final Fantasy IV - My introduction to the series. Wonderful gameplay, pretty streamlined story, music and graphics are great.
Final Fantasy VI - Easily the most epic game, with the best stories, the best character selections, and the best open world. You could probably play this over and over and over and have a different experience each time.
Final Fantasy VII - The first half of the game is like the newer FF's, all linear and plot-based, yet the open-world second half is a nice continuation of FFVI. The shift to 3D results in the best summons EVER (seriously this is one of the main things that makes me want to replay it), and I also think this game maybe has the best enemies ever, just such a huge variety of random encounter models. After this one I think they dropped the ball on the enemies and this is the peak. Story is kind of meh and confusing but the sense of humor and off the wall goofiness (Chocobo races, the Gold Saucer, snowboarding mini game) paradoxically bring things down to Earth.
Final Fantasy VIII - Eh.....the combat is dreadful, and the enemies are so scant. Feels like 1/5 the amount of unique bad guys that were in VII. Fighting fucking caterpillars for 40 hours. Also by the time it gets to the end game it's clear they just kind of gave up w making new environments (except for the sweet final castle). Main character sucks, but the music is nice, and the lame story does have some incredibly cool setpieces (fighting zombie president on a train). Triple Triad is probably more fun than the rest of the game, at least until you get drowned in a pile of confusing rules. It's worth owning this game solely to bring up Triple Triad and just leave the music playing while you clean your room.
Final Fantasy IX - Haven't played more than an hour or two but the art direction turns me off. I do think I'll get into it in earnest some day but I want to find a nice mod that speeds up combat when I do.
Final Fantasy X - Combat of the Gods. Storyline is pretty great too (Yuna's character, despite being kidnapped every other scene, has a really interesting arc to it). If they ever do an HD remake of FFVII they need to use this combat system so you can just switch out Tifa and Vincent et al in the middle of battle.

I decided to try winning one of the butterfly catches during lunch, just ended in complete and total frustration. You have tenths of a second to spare in this, it's so ridiculous. Why couldn't we have a full minute to do this in? Anyways after a dozen tries I started using save states and even then it was nearly impossible. After a bunch of tries I finally caught the last butterfly and a treasure chest appeared and.... dropped... off the map.... Eff this I don't have time for this. Eff the celestial weapons, eff the Omega Ruins, I'm just going to beat the game and move on to something sane.

My favourite Final Fantasy game is Fire Emblem: Awakening.

Ok I figured I'd give FFX another shot wrt to post-game bonus stuff, did some grinding in Omega Ruins, then decided to go get the remaining Aeons. I had to go into 2 temples and find the destruction spheres, which was easy to do in Zanarkand but I couldn't go into Macalania because Dark Shiva was waiting for me and INSTANT DEATH. So I decide to track down Yojimbo first and his BFG attack is instant death to even a dark aeon. So Dark Shiva gets whiped out, I get that last destruction sphere, go to Baaj and collect Anima for my troubles. One of my main goals at this point is to take out One Eye so that I can get Triple AP weapons, yet I can't really take on any Monster Arena bosses without dying. That is, until I get Yojimbo and Anima. So I finally start getting these Triple AP weapons and I captured a Don Tonberry earlier so I have been doing the AP farming trick to level everyone up ridiculous amounts.

So yay life is good.

so is anyone going to get type-0 HD? wasn't thinking about it but annual bonus is making me have dumb ideas~