The Best of the Best

[Daniel]

I know that both David and Greg are big video game fans, so I thought to ask: out of all of gaming history, whether old or new, just what games do you guys think are at the top?

Well, I myself don't have enough experience with games to really say too much, but I'll throw FF7 out there. I can play that one over and over again and it never gets old. Both the story and gameplay are fantastic. I played it in Japanese last time, and I think it's even better than the English version (think sub versus dub). I've diddled around with the earlier FF games, but not too much (they're on my to-do list). I have played 8 and 10, though, but still they don't compare to 7. 8 was alright, but 10 was much too linear.

[greg]

You must give the earlier games a shot. The epitome of the Final Fantasy series was #6. It had the best story, best characters, best fighting system (although I do like the Materia system from FF7), and the best music. FF4 was great, with memorable characters. FF5 had the nice job system going for it, but the characters were mostly forgettable. I started playing FF1 on my Playstation, but I got a bit frustrated with it and shelved it for a while. Maybe it's been too long since I last played it! I do remember what I was doing when I abandoned it. The game has an insane encounter rate. There is one dungeon where there is a bend in the path and every step you take, there's an encounter. Sailing on the ocean, you are constantly being attacked. There is no real character development, only "the four warriors of light" and the generic story about crystals. That's all that was really necessary back then, though.

FF8 sucked because of that crappy junctioning system with the GFs. FF6 had a junctioning system too, but FF8's was just bad. You couldn't cast any spells unless you were junctioned, and you couldn't even use an item like a potion or phoenix down! You couldn't even reach in your pocket and toss a wad of pocket lint and used chewing gum at an enemy unless you were junctioned! The only way I beat the end of that game was that I had all three of my most powerful characters selected for the final fight with the sorceress by random chance. That game stank and I sold it a year or so ago. I gave up on Final Fantasy games after that (except for the Tactics series).

The best RPG experience for me was Chrono Trigger. I think it has something like eight different possible endings, and after you finish the game, you can start the game again with all of your stats, weapons, and items intact. I think I must have played through the game at least three or four times now.

[Brain Trash]

I definitely want to post something far more substantial in this thread, but for the time being I'd just like to point out that as great as FFVII is, it was also the first game in the series with Tetsuya Nomura as lead character designer. And while his work in FFVII largely ranges anywhere from mostly painless to pretty damn good (that design for the Jenova Doll is and remains easily and without argument the single best thing he's ever done), he has of course since then gone on to quickly and famously grow into one of the absolute worst things to ever happen to Japanese art and video game character designing.

Very close to everything that's been wrong with the visual look of modern Japanese games over the course of the last 13/15-ish years can be more or less traced back to him and laid at his feet. Been wondering all these years why in the hell it is that Japanese artists have been increasingly youth obsessed and stamping out all manner of non-androgyny in all their character designs and why every article of clothing on a character now looks like it was ripped directly from the pages of a douchetastically pretentious Japanese fashion magazine? Nomura was one of the key individuals that grandfathered that entire trend, which still persists to this very day. You can easily and with minimal effort spot all the early warning signs of what was to come from him all over FFVII's entire aesthetic, which today now with the benefit of hindsight looks like a horrifying prophecy of what was to come.

I still love FFVII as much as the next person in spite of all that, but its impossible to deny that it marked the beginning of the end times for quality JRPGs in several ways. All the more so in the case of the Final Fantasy franchise specifically; the lead character designer for the series before Nomura? Yoshitaka motherfucking Amano. Even before getting into the gameplay nuance, for that reason alone the I-VI era of the series effortlessly trounces VII and onward. I mean Jesus Christ, going directly from Amano to Nomura? That kind of artistic downgrade is comparable to say... the soundtrack of a long running film franchise heavily featuring Joy Division at first in its earlier installments and then scraping them later on in favor of The All American Rejects.

Or to put it in visual terms, you go from this:



To this:



*Edited to fix second image.

[greg]

The second image won't load, but your music analogy certainly makes sense, since I am a Joy Division fan myself.

For some hilarious reviews on why modern Final Fantasy games totally suck, devote time to watching these:
http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/fi ... tasy-viii/
http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/ga ... fantasy-x/

The whole effeminite, whiny, emo kid as the typical RPG protagonist has been waaaaay overdone since the brooding Cloud in FF7. Grandia on the Saturn was the biggest contender when FF7 was released. The protagonist of that game was a fun-loving, optimistic, adventuresome kid. Then when Grandia 2 came out, the protagonist for that game was a brooding jerk. Then Skies of Arcadia came out, and that protagonist was a swashbuckling, treasure-seeking, fun-loving kind of guy. Then look at the whiny Meg Ryan bitch in FF10 and his stupid volleyball crap. Ugh.

I hear that Radiant Historia on the DS involves soldiers trying to save their country. I'm looking forward to that game eventually. They need to break the mold of crappy progagonists that the Final Fantasy series has promoted. I don't think any of the Dragon Quest games were like that, at least.

[Jen526]

I gotta say, I really like FF10 from a gameplay perspective. It was the first "new" generation FF that I really *enjoyed* enough to go back and replay it. I find the obsessive fangirl/boy-ness of FF7 to be really baffling. It hasn't aged well for me and I never really liked it all THAT much to begin with.

I do agree with others that FF6 is da bomb. FF6 and Dragon Quest 4 set a HUGE bar for me that most modern j-rpg's simply can't meet. To this day, I'm always so disappointed when a game reaches the end and it's really the END, because both FF6 and DQ4 did this wonderful thing where it *looked* like you were reaching the end, but then, whoops, there's a whole 'nother half of the game to go! Any time a game doesn't pull that psych on me, I feel a little ripped off.

The other series that is near and dear to my heart is Suikoden. The way games 1, 2, and 3 did the overlap of characters and gameworld locations while moving forward a bit in time is so cool to me. It grieves me to no end every time a new Suikoden game is announced that doesn't continue with that trend... but I still replay 1-3 occasionally. They don't get old.

[Brain Trash]

To elaborate a bit on my thoughts on FFVII: what always especially stood out about it for me is that it easily has one of the greatest game soundtracks of all time. Definitely the best soundtrack among the Final Fantasy series I'd say (though VI's is also up there and more than gives it a run for its money, so there's that). As for the rest of the game... the early Midgar portion is great, easily the best and most memorable part of the entire game (especially the stuff in the Shinra headquarters). And while there are those who'll slam it, I've always dug the hell out of the Nibelheim subplot (which at times is genuinely creepy in a way that Final Fantasy never was before or since then), along with various other random elements and portions of the game throughout.

But as fantastic as FFVII is... at a certain point it IS horribly, horribly overrated by some very over-enthusiastic, to the point of irritating, fans (not that I'm accusing Daniel of being one such fan, cause I'm definitely not). Part of that I think comes from the fact that for whatever reason it was the very, very first JRPG for a lot of those people and as such they tend to treat it as ground zero for the entire genre (which of course its anything but), and at the worst of times as the only one that really matters. Those... incredibly hyper-enthusiastic fans of the game get so overbearing in their praise that it tends to annoy others to a point where the game gets reflexively shat upon in some circles, sometimes so excessively to a point where the game goes all the way back around to being underrated.

Its a vicious circle, and at the end of the day I think it should best be remembered as plainly and simply a great JRPG: not a masterpiece of Chrono Trigger-killing proportions, nor an overhyped lump of fanboy stroking horseshit... but just very, very solid and one of the best JRPGs of the 32 bit era, and certainly at least somewhere within the top five Final Fantasy games of all time along with the original, IV, V, and VI; though some might argue for maybe III to replace V since V can be a bit... divisive to put it mildly (I'm in the camp that likes it a lot though, albeit mainly for the gameplay). No its not going to cure the blind and make cripples walk again, but a shallow piece of shit it also certainly ain't either. Its simply a great, solid game. There's definitely better (both in its own genre and in general) but there are certainly a great deal more that are far, far worse. If its either the single best or the single worst JRPG you've ever played, you need to play more JRPGs.

The whole effeminite, whiny, emo kid as the typical RPG protagonist has been waaaaay overdone since the brooding Cloud in FF7. Grandia on the Saturn was the biggest contender when FF7 was released. The protagonist of that game was a fun-loving, optimistic, adventuresome kid. Then when Grandia 2 came out, the protagonist for that game was a brooding jerk. Then Skies of Arcadia came out, and that protagonist was a swashbuckling, treasure-seeking, fun-loving kind of guy. Then look at the whiny Meg Ryan bitch in FF10 and his stupid volleyball crap. Ugh.

Yeah about that... while I more than agree that the whole whiny, petulant emo thing needs desperately to curdle and die, I certainly don't think that going in the exact opposite extreme of mega happy smiles and go-get-'em spunk is all that much of an improvement. Either extreme sucks large quantities of ass for their own very different reasons. Nobody likes an angsting teenager, but an overly optimistic little spitball of cheerful adventure running around and blowing sunshine up everyone's asses isn't in any way a desirable alternative either.

We've actually had a LOT of characters just like that in Japanese material... mainly within the 2nd layer of Hell that is the glut of mega epic shonen franchises of the last 15 some-odd years. The Son Goku-spawned Luffy's and Naruto's of the world are every inch as annoying and punchable with their insufferably saccharine upbeat cheeriness as the Cloud-spawned Squall's and Tidus' and whatnot are with their mopey, po-faced brooding and wangsting. Teenage behavior sucks, but lets not pretend that childish behavior somehow sucks any less when the simple truth is that they're simply two different ends of the same shit sandwich of irritating.

It IS in fact possible to write a protagonist that's neither a zipper and belt buckle clad wrist cutter with stupid hair nor a peppy, wide eyed innocent with their face permanently nailed into a huge, goofy, child-like grin. Such a character concept is what some of us would refer to as a grown-ass adult with some actual perspective. A rather novel and much needed idea for the Japanese at this point I would say.

[Daishikaze]

I think both character types can be done in ways that are pretty good, but for whatever reason the creators choose to go too far one way or the other most of the time. I guess because its much easier to just let everything go to one side of the spectrum instead working hard to balance the character out?

Personally, my favorite JRPGs are The Phantasy Star series (1 through 4), Grandia 1, Chrono Trigger, the Lunar series, the Ys series, and Tales of Phantasia.

[greg]

So about Phantasy Star 1, have you seen the remake on the PS2? It looks really cool, and I appreciate how they didn't update it "too much."

I've played Tales of Phantasia, the translated ROM on my Xbox. I got stuck in one dungeon and couldn't figure out where to go, and I eventually lost track of it. Grandia 1 was stellar, enough to forgive the atrocious dubbing of that one rabbity character. I plan to play the Lunar games... eventually. They're the main reason why I bought a Sega CD.

[Daishikaze]

So about Phantasy Star 1, have you seen the remake on the PS2? It looks really cool, and I appreciate how they didn't update it "too much."

I've played Tales of Phantasia, the translated ROM on my Xbox. I got stuck in one dungeon and couldn't figure out where to go, and I eventually lost track of it. Grandia 1 was stellar, enough to forgive the atrocious dubbing of that one rabbity character. I plan to play the Lunar games... eventually. They're the main reason why I bought a Sega CD.

Unfortunately I didn't know about the Phantasy Star 1 remake, now I'm gonna have to track it down. But first I need a Japanese PS2 to play it on

[raiderfan99]

Xenogears is the best, because the Yggdrasil IV turns into a Macross rip off.

Oh, and its eerily similar to that other show with the maniac schiozo depressed teen character too that pilots a mech....