Has Combat in Final Fantasy always been boring?

[Yora]

I played all the way through 10 and 13, did a good chunk of 7 and am now maybe a third or so through 12. And once again I am amazed how terrible dull and tedious combat is. I did a quick search for "Final Fantasy boring combat" and you get a lot of results where people complain about boring combat in 12, 13, 14, and 14. And there seems to be some consensus that combat was just outright terrible in 8.

Combat in 10 wasn't that bad. I actually had fun with it, and only sometimes did dungeons drag on for too long. But with 12 and 13 combat is just brain dead dull and dungeons take absolutely forever with waves after waves after waves of always the same trivial enemies.

Was 10 the exception, or has combat in Final Fantasy games always been a tedious chore?

[Hunter Noventa]

Combat in Final Fantasy has always been of the style of the time. FF1-3 was strictly turn based after all, just like every other RPG, it was what worked and what they had. 4 gave us the first iteration of the ATB system, which, while new and fancy at the time, didn't change all that much all the way through 9.

10 was the first real step away from the ATB system (FFT doesn't count, even if it is my favorite Final Fantasy) and I found it a lot of fun too. Quick without being too simple, strategic without being overcomplicated.

12 was, well, 12. You could program the game to play itself once you had the right gambits. 13 was worse that regard in that you only ever had control over one character and the other two kind of did their thing on their own, and even then you didn't have that much control.

14 is an MMO, so it's kind of an outlier anyway, but I don't think it's bad.

I can't say much about 15 having never played it, but it never looked too fun in trailers to me, and I fear the 7 remake will be similar to it, for the worse.

Personally 12 was the only one I found overly tedious the first time through, having not played 13 or 15. The ATB system has flaws certainly, but it's also more affected by the mechanics around it,which is to say what your characters can do.

In 4 you didn't care much, it was exciting and new and the characters had distinct roles. In 5 you had an incredible job system and surprising amount of mechanical complexity behind it. 6 had less distinct roles than 4, and after a while everyone became fairly similar save for their unique command, some of which are far better than others.

In 7 the only real difference between characters, in the end, was their limit breaks,this made characters interchangeable for the most part, and this is even worse in 8. 9 went back to having distinct roles for everyone, but what I felt was an awful system for learning abilities.

In think it's the mechanics that surround the actual combat, more than the actual system of combat, that affects the perception of these games, personally.

Has it always been boring? I don't think so. Did it get boring? Quite certainly.

[Knaight]

Crystal Chronicles had a solid combat system, so they've managed it at least once.

[Triaxx]

Thing about FF9 was that you didn't necessarily Have to learn the skills, just be willing to take a defense hit for sub-human gear to get the ability.

As FF8, I found it the most interesting of the modern combat systems. Oh, I'm in an area with enemies that dodge? Better Junction something to make me hit more often. Even if I would otherwise get a ton of damage for this on my weapon.

[tyckspoon]

Thing about FF9 was that you didn't necessarily Have to learn the skills, just be willing to take a defense hit for sub-human gear to get the ability.

As FF8, I found it the most interesting of the modern combat systems. Oh, I'm in an area with enemies that dodge? Better Junction something to make me hit more often. Even if I would otherwise get a ton of damage for this on my weapon.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to work with that system organically, without cheesing out Triple Triad/Card Mod/other GF upgrade abilities for junction spells (like creating bulk -ra tier spells when you're only supposed to have the base level 1, or getting super-early access to Curaga for huge amounts of HP from converting Cottages.) It doesn't even take very rare/high-level spells to do it, either - something as simple as Status Attack junctioned with 100 Death (easily attainable from fairly common Tonberry cards), Sleep, or Petrify just completely wrecks something like 80% of the enemies in the game.

[Hunter Noventa]

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to work with that system organically, without cheesing out Triple Triad/Card Mod/other GF upgrade abilities for junction spells (like creating bulk -ra tier spells when you're only supposed to have the base level 1, or getting super-early access to Curaga for huge amounts of HP from converting Cottages.) It doesn't even take very rare/high-level spells to do it, either - something as simple as Status Attack junctioned with 100 Death (easily attainable from fairly common Tonberry cards), Sleep, or Petrify just completely wrecks something like 80% of the enemies in the game.

Yeah the Junction system was very easily game-able to outright break the game, even if the system itself was not explained very well. It's a good idea that suffered from poor implementation.

The real issue with it is something that plagued 7 and 10 as well, where after a certain point, the biggest difference between characters was only their limit breaks. Technically, Cloud, Yuffie and Cid is the best FF7 party because they all have access to the best multi-hit limit breaks. 8 at least had everyone bringing some manner of multi-hit battle-ending power to their limit breaks.

In 10? In 10 you could make Lulu entirely redundant with a teleport sphere and shifting Yuna to her path at the right time to teach her some Black Magic, because Lulu's limit break is garbage, and her ultimate weapon is one of the worst to get, right up there with Tidus and Wakka. My endgame party always ends up being Yuna, Rikku and Auron.

[Triaxx]

That's actually how I did it the first time around, was without know how those tricks worked and largely ignoring the card game. Until I realized I needed it for the Lionheart, but that was on Disc 3 when I could go anywhere.

Of course once you realize how Junction works, it's all easy. Cactuars? Please. Crits are guaranteed hits, Selphie's ultimate weapon auto hits and I can set up any of the others to a 255% hit chance. A little aura, a little bit of water on Irvine and some shotgun rounds for his Limit Break? Sit and rip through entire encounters in ten seconds or less. All the AP you'll ever need.

[Aotrs Commander]

I have played, I think, 5-12 and X-2. Five is on DS and I've never finished; I think I may have played a bit of four on an emulator.

Notably, of the rest, 12 is the only one I have never finished; and my favourite was 10 for several reasons, not least the combat was the most strategic I felt in the FF series, due to its turn base. In at least 7-9, I hit max level and maxed out pretty much, but I have sort of passed the point where I feel like grinding anymore. (And notably, I haven't played any JRPGs in quite a few years; since the telly was stolen, actually, in the dining room. The 3D printer now sist on its slot, so my PS2 has been plugged in, even, for a long time.)

[Gnoman]

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to work with that system organically, without cheesing out Triple Triad/Card Mod/other GF upgrade abilities for junction spells (like creating bulk -ra tier spells when you're only supposed to have the base level 1, or getting super-early access to Curaga for huge amounts of HP from converting Cottages.) It doesn't even take very rare/high-level spells to do it, either - something as simple as Status Attack junctioned with 100 Death (easily attainable from fairly common Tonberry cards), Sleep, or Petrify just completely wrecks something like 80% of the enemies in the game.

One of the biggest reasons that FF8 gets so much flak is that people think "stand and Draw for 20 minutes for every spell" is the best way to get spells, and this is incredibly tedious. You're pretty much explicitly intended to use refining to get a lot of your spells - that's why so many enemies drop items that have no use except for refining. This is also why "The system punishes leveling" is wrong - the direct stat gains from leveling up aren't enough to get you ahead, but higher-level monsters drop better Refining items, which put your stats well ahead of the curve.

Even without card mod, breaking the difficulty curve in half was trivial. ST-J Death or Break start becoming very effective at 40 or 50 spells (unless an enemy is specifically resistant, the % chance of it working on any given hit is the number of junctioned spells), which are easy to get, and fairly common drops can push your HP midway into the 4 digit range by Timber.


Which is a key part of the problem with FF8 - either you completely failed to understand the system at all (which would turn the game into a frustrating brick wall of frustration) or you rendered the game super easy (which becomes boring unless you're the type to find "just how crazy can I go with this" entertaining as an end in itself).


Throw in a convoluted story that is really quite good but requires you to find a ton of easily-missed extra content and intuitive leaps to make sense, and you get the most debated title in the franchise.

[darkdragoon]

Generally it depends. If you're the sort of person that finds Attack and Cure to be a wide variety of options you can probably get through but it's going to be tedious.

XII has several important things that can't be gambited at all, and another group that technically function but aren't really 'set and forget' either.

XIII has all sorts of weird quirks. Like there's the argument you are supposed to bumble through the majority of fights as poor ratings net you strong consumables.

[tensai_oni]

Final Fantasy always had boring combat. XIII is actually when I liked it most as it offers actual meaningful tactical decisions. Sure a commando, sentinel and medic trio can carry you through 95% encounters but it's also painfully slow, boring, and gives you bad rating for failing to finish the fight with anything resembling speed. Trying to get a good combat rating is much faster and significantly more exciting.

Before that? Final Fantasy was always simplistic and generic as far as combat systems go. Best it could do is make fights finish quickly by minimizing delays and making attack animations fast and exciting. FF VI did that. VII and VIII kinda did, with some infamous exceptions. IX definitely didn't, the fights were painfully slow and lumbering (for shame, as it's a great game otherwise). And everything before V is a clunker you shouldn't play unless you really want a retro gaming experience.

[Rodin]

I found combat in X to be quite tedious because of how character leveling was set up. A character only gets experience if they contributed to the battle - however, most battles are not sufficiently dangerous to have your entire team get experience. In addition, most of the time you don't want to be burning precious MP points on these easy opponents.

This results in a system where every fight initiates with a couple of characters attacking monsters weaknesses to one-shot them, then everybody else in the party running up to the final enemy and tapping it on the head so they can say "I'm helping!" :elan:

Once you get into the endgame content with a full set of characters leveled up, the combat is actually quite fascinating. The monster arena is a lot of fun and by the most strategic of the games I've played. It's just a terrible grind to get to that point, made worse by many of the areas being fairly linear.

FF6 has the combat I enjoy the most, but it's hampered by Magic being pretty OP. Any character with a poor unique ability just learns magic, and it eventually becomes basically impossible to die unless the enemies wipe your entire team in one turn thanks to Life 2 being a thing. The game becomes a lot more fun if you restrict which characters can learn certain spells. For instance, Strago and Relm have abilities that are generally just weaker than staving an enemies face in with a fireball. So, you force them to use those abilities - Strago can only cast Lore/Blue magic, and Relm is only allowed to learn White magic to force her into using Sketch/Control if she wants to be offensive.

It does still leave some characters more powerful than others (Sabin is a beast no matter what you do with him), but it does make the differences less pronounced and ups the difficulty quite a bit.

[GloatingSwine]

To start thinking about this you have to start with what combat is for.

Most combat in JRPGs is there to cause attrition, to make the player spend some of their resources either using MP or items defeating enemies quickly or healing back up.

That means that individual encounters are not supposed to be particularly dangerous, so they can't really push the player very hard in most of them because there are going to be a lot, usually only requiring you to recognise one weakness and use the appropriate skill to minimise the attrition.

That makes it easy to call most of the combat "boring", because there can't be a lot of enemy variety in each area due to time, memory, and theming constraints, and most of the combat has to be limited in terms of player engagement.

You kinda have to judge how interesting the combat in a JRPG is by the bosses rather than the day to day enemies.

(Also one of the downfalls of FFXIII, they took away the attrition but still have low enemy variety, so fights that are supposed to be an easily solved problem which still costs a few resources were easily solved but cost no resources. There was a game called Enchanted Arms which was similar but the restoration between combats came out of a stamina bar so there was still an attrition component, at least until you became OP because one turn battles had no cost).

[Aotrs Commander]

To start thinking about this you have to start with what combat is for.

Most combat in JRPGs is there to cause attrition, to make the player spend some of their resources either using MP or items defeating enemies quickly or healing back up.

And I think, in my old age, this is perhaps why they've lost my interest a fair bit. (Not that they had it for ever so long, since it was only a year or two prior to the release of FFX that they even had it much.) I just find the grind a bit too tedious now (in the case of Pokémon, the grind gets pushed to "something to do while I wait for stuff/at social events." (Yes, I'm one of THOSE.)) I just don't have the motivation to fire 'em up (though the fact I'd have to make a special effort to find a telly to connect 'em too now probably hasn't helped matters; I suppose things might be different if the dining room telly hadn't been stolen and tits spot replaced by the 3D printer before we got around to replacing it).

[GloatingSwine]

Classic JRPG combat has found a pretty nice niche on handhelds for largely that reason. Because if you need something mildly diverting for a train journey, something like I am Setsuna fills it in nicely.

I'll be getting DQ11 on the PS4, but largely otherwise if there's a Switch version I'll pick those up for that reason.

[Yora]

If combat is supposed to be the meat of the game, it has to be exciting.
If combat is just an afterthought, then it has to be out of the way quickly.

But making combat unexciting and forcing you to spend forever fighting enemies, then this is just objectively bad design. It's pure padding to make the game feel much longer than it actually is, simple as that. Thoug I wouldn't mind getting only a 20 hour game of good content instead a game of 20 hours of content and 20 hours of pointless grind.

[DomaDoma]

Yora says that as someone who chose to name himself after a minor character in one of the more tedious FF games, combat-wise. Goes to show that story counts for a lot. :)

[Hunter Noventa]

Which is a key part of the problem with FF8 - either you completely failed to understand the system at all (which would turn the game into a frustrating brick wall of frustration) or you rendered the game super easy (which becomes boring unless you're the type to find "just how crazy can I go with this" entertaining as an end in itself).

The issue of course, is that FF8 does a terrible job of explaining it's systems.

[Kato]

I'm a simple person, but there's no FF game where I would say "the combat is terrible".
Of course there are some I like better than others but I feel like just going by the battle mechanics I'd pick up any part again, if I could skip the tenth repeat of a story I already know inside out. Coming from that direction, I very much prefer games with more freedom of how to play it / develop my characters. Of course some entries can become stale at some point, depending on how much grinding is required. And there are obviously loads of other factors, including personal play style.


The issue of course, is that FF8 does a terrible job of explaining it's systems.

I never got that complaint about VIII. I sure wasn't the brightest 12(?) year old but I could understand the mechanics well enough. Not to the point where I could break the game at that point but I knew what it wanted me to do and could do that. Were some tutorials tedious walls of text? Yeah. But hard to understand? I don't think so.

[Rodin]

The main thing that drove me away from FF8 was the long load times for...well, everything. A good 10 seconds of spinning around the arena before you can fight got old FAST, especially since I was coming off FFX which had much faster loading. Add into that terribly long animations for the summons and it was just...ugh.

[danzibr]

I’m a huge FF fan. Played all but the MMOs. But... most of the combat systems are pretty bland.

[Gnoman]

I'm a simple person, but there's no FF game where I would say "the combat is terrible".
I never got that complaint about VIII. I sure wasn't the brightest 12(?) year old but I could understand the mechanics well enough. Not to the point where I could break the game at that point but I knew what it wanted me to do and could do that. Were some tutorials tedious walls of text? Yeah. But hard to understand? I don't think so.

You don't get a Refining tutorial at all, and the tuts you do get are just the most basic mechanics. A modern FF with the same ability and battle system would have had two or three more "exams" to explain all of the critical points.


FF8 is one of my favorite FFs, but mechanics explanation is very much a weak point.

[Erloas]

I played many of the games but honestly can't remember much specific about them and know I could easily get some of them confused with other similar JRPGs.
7 wasn't anything special, but it wasn't bad either. I would guess that that style doesn't age well, I don't remember it as an issue at the time.

It wasn't that long ago that I played 15, so I remember that. There were a few parts that seemed a little clunky, but overall I have no real complaints. It doesn't stand out as exceptional and I never found it detracting from the game.

For points of comparison, of single player RPGs that I've played relatively recently; Diablo 3, Mass Effect, Bioshock Infinite I've enjoyed combat wise; Borderlands above average,Wastelands 2 was pretty good, although more tactical than RPG in today's genres, Fallout NV (and what I remember of 3) are pretty mediocre, Witcher I would also put at mediocre, I couldn't even finish Dragon Age mostly due to the combat.... and I'm sure there are a lot more that are just slipping my mind.

[danzibr]

I feel like I should explain the bland comment more. Most FFs, I just attack or auto through nearly every encounter, heal between. At least that’s what comes to mind. If there’s a ton of mobs, maybe AoE. It’s just... bland.

Compare this to like Xenoblade or Cosmic Star Heroine or a number of other games.

But ya know, maybe that’s a bit unfair. In the FFs, you have options, just don’t need them. Plus Lightning Returns was exceptionally fun. Suspiciously fun considering its predecessors. One of my single favorite games ever.

[Triaxx]

At least FF8's long summon times had a purpose. You had to be REALLY bad to not get a 255 on the later GF anims.

Curiously, most of the FF8 information you needed, was actually explained in the game, on the student terminal.

I personally think FF9 got a bit of a bad rap. Yes, the fights could be tedious, but learning to use characters to their proper effect and which row to put them in helped immensely. The squishy wizard is much less squishy when standing in the back row with it's bonus to physical defense. And now you're not spending your time healing them but instead they're busy slinging magic...

Also leaving Steiner behind in the pro-magic place and taking Dagger to the anti-magic place might seem strange, but she couldn't do much no matter where she was, and he had both powerful physicals plus his magic blade to make the place a cakewalk. (Took my third time around to learn that.)

[BeerMug Paladin]

From the classic days? Probably yes.

JRPGs in general have a sort of niche appeal. The combat itself seems to be a kind of cathartic sort of experience, offering you something to do, but without really being challenging, until you encounter bosses or special enemies. Unless you make unforced errors or run low on resources, which could both force backtracking. That said, it's probably not a design element that could appeal to anyone.

Compare to the Diablo-type games out there, where the basic enemies are mowed down by the hundreds without difficulty on the way towards the showdown with a difficult boss. It's effectively the same thing, although in those games the emphasis is on action, so resource shortages and unforced errors can be more of an immediate, endangering issue to the player. This is just the turn-based equivalent of that.

I know people who find both these approaches boring for the same reason.

I can't speak for many of the latter FF games, though. My last experience with one was 12, which in my mind only became boring at the end when 50+% of the time during combat encounters were characters auto-casting buffs on one another. Which was also kind of funny, actually.

The issue of course, is that FF8 does a terrible job of explaining it's systems.
Definitely this. It's like the game was created with the intent to sell strategy guides or something. If I recall correctly, you have to unlock the refining items ability on one of the GFs before you can use it. Which happens early on, but not before you get used to the idea of drawing magic from enemies. From descriptions in-game, I regarded that ability as not worthwhile enough to care about it until gaining most other abilities. Aside from that, the characters are largely interchangeable thanks to the primary power coming from those stat-boosts. I recall only needing a couple of decent boosts on a character to make combat easy, even against bosses.

There were other issues with the game, though. The weapon upgrading system was pretty tedious and largely didn't seem to matter. I never put any attention towards deliberately working to upgrade any weapon, since the stats upgrades were enough. Towards the end of the game I didn't even go into any upgrade screen for any weapon, so it was very likely that I could have upgraded my gear with the random loot drops I had, but it ultimately didn't matter.

The card minigame wasn't bad, but it would have been better if you didn't have to quest all over the place in order to get the unique/rare cards and could permanently lose cards. I gave up at one point trying to find opponents because it became rather tedious to just find someone at roughly my power level.

There's also the fact that the game (unlike few others) offers a save point for you to use after the point where you can no longer backtrack. Making end-game quests impossible to revisit, and bonus dungeons no longer possible to find (this is of course, assuming there were some). So, if you wind up reloading your save file with the intent of doing end-game completionist content after playing through the main quest fully, you may find out that you have to start over. It doesn't help that the final dungeon is huge, making it more likely the player will use the available save point.

Sure there's story-hints that this may result, but the general assumption for these sorts of games has always been that this is a thing-that-does-not-happen. This is unlikely to be a strong focus of most criticisms of the game out there, but I'll certainly never play it again because of this.

[DomaDoma]

I will say that something straightforward but time-consuming like FF beats the pants off something like Chrono Cross, which is just as time-consuming but also head-poundingly abstruse. And, while we're on the most abstruse FF game, somehow I missed the importance of the Draw mechanic first time through FF8... which got me to the end of disc one in one piece, but every boss battle was about twenty minutes long.

[Triaxx]

Amusingly I still remember the best Draw Exploit. Draw casting Demi on Diablo would make him cast Curaga on the character who'd used it, and split his Hp in half. Until the end when you could kill him in one shot.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I think the issue with latter FF's being called boring action is that in the early days... FF's combat was no more or less tedious than any other game of the era. Take, for example, Dragon Warrior or its sequel, which basically forced a ton of grinding on you to get anywhere relevant. So while combat was probably boring by modern day standards, so was everyone else's, and nostalgia glasses weigh heavily in ignoring it.

FF IV introduced the ATB system, including introducing the Dragoon who took advantage of it with the Jump system by having an actual time delay between attack input and attack landing. However, while the combat looked prettier, it was fundamentally the same... input commands and wait.

This went on until FF X, which was kind of the problem. While other games advanced in their mechanics... Final Fantasy really didn't, at least as far as combat mechanics went. By this point, it had been enshrined as a cornerstone of what 'made a FF game', there would've probably been people who would have complained that it didn't 'feel' like a FF game if they'd gone to something different. X's system was something of a refresh of the old mechanic, being able to swap in other players mid-combat, and you had the battle wheel telling you who had a turn coming up. However, in effect, you were basically doing the same thing... selecting an option in a menu and waiting.

I don't even want to mention FF VIII's horrible gimmick. Others have already done so, I'll let it rest there. Failed experiment.

FF XII was... well, it was another failed experiment, hence why they dumped it all together and did FF XIV instead of simply trying to patch FF XII up to the new standard. It was their first experience with the MMO genre and didn't quite appreciate the difficulty involved.But they learned from their mistakes... which is where FF XIV came from.

I would really disagree about FF XIV's combat being 'boring'. Quite the reverse, it is one of the most interesting and dynamic combat system of any MMO I've ever played, and I've been raiding MMO's since Everquest days. It took everything 'right' about WoW, then took it to the next level. Melee classes have combos, as in 'this move does x damage, but it does 50% more if it is performed right after this other move', and several classes have specific combo gimmicks (like Ninja with three-button inputs for every command, or Monk's stance dance). Hell, even Black Mage, the quintessential glass canon blaster, has to do more than just 'blast and blast harder', because you have to swap between fire and ice stance to maximize DPS vs mana regen, and they introduce monsters having a telegraphed area attack you want to get out of the way of even in the earliest newbie zones, so you HAVE to be at least moderately mobile in combat.

That's my two cents, at least, from having actually played them.

[Ignimortis]

I think the issue with latter FF's being called boring action is that in the early days... FF's combat was no more or less tedious than any other game of the era. Take, for example, Dragon Warrior or its sequel, which basically forced a ton of grinding on you to get anywhere relevant. So while combat was probably boring by modern day standards, so was everyone else's, and nostalgia glasses weigh heavily in ignoring it.

FF IV introduced the ATB system, including introducing the Dragoon who took advantage of it with the Jump system by having an actual time delay between attack input and attack landing. However, while the combat looked prettier, it was fundamentally the same... input commands and wait.

This went on until FF X, which was kind of the problem. While other games advanced in their mechanics... Final Fantasy really didn't, at least as far as combat mechanics went. By this point, it had been enshrined as a cornerstone of what 'made a FF game', there would've probably been people who would have complained that it didn't 'feel' like a FF game if they'd gone to something different. X's system was something of a refresh of the old mechanic, being able to swap in other players mid-combat, and you had the battle wheel telling you who had a turn coming up. However, in effect, you were basically doing the same thing... selecting an option in a menu and waiting.

I don't even want to mention FF VIII's horrible gimmick. Others have already done so, I'll let it rest there. Failed experiment.

FF XII was... well, it was another failed experiment, hence why they dumped it all together and did FF XIV instead of simply trying to patch FF XII up to the new standard. It was their first experience with the MMO genre and didn't quite appreciate the difficulty involved.But they learned from their mistakes... which is where FF XIV came from.

I would really disagree about FF XIV's combat being 'boring'. Quite the reverse, it is one of the most interesting and dynamic combat system of any MMO I've ever played, and I've been raiding MMO's since Everquest days. It took everything 'right' about WoW, then took it to the next level. Melee classes have combos, as in 'this move does x damage, but it does 50% more if it is performed right after this other move', and several classes have specific combo gimmicks (like Ninja with three-button inputs for every command, or Monk's stance dance). Hell, even Black Mage, the quintessential glass canon blaster, has to do more than just 'blast and blast harder', because you have to swap between fire and ice stance to maximize DPS vs mana regen, and they introduce monsters having a telegraphed area attack you want to get out of the way of even in the earliest newbie zones, so you HAVE to be at least moderately mobile in combat.

That's my two cents, at least, from having actually played them.

I second everything said about XIV, but the first MMO in Final Fantasy was XI, not XII. And it was mildly popular and is still ongoing, as far as I know.

By the way...FF VIII probably doesn't teach the player about refining intentionally. It was a semi-hard game until I learned that refining existed, then it was too easy, because having 3k health an hour into the game, and getting better very quickly just turns combat into a slugfest. If you don't refine anything, the game is actually pretty challenging.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I second everything said about XIV, but the first MMO in Final Fantasy was XI, not XII. And it was mildly popular and is still ongoing, as far as I know.

By the way...FF VIII probably doesn't teach the player about refining intentionally. It was a semi-hard game until I learned that refining existed, then it was too easy, because having 3k health an hour into the game, and getting better very quickly just turns combat into a slugfest. If you don't refine anything, the game is actually pretty challenging.

Ahh, right, XI. Yea, it was a real train-wreck, mechanically speaking. Yes, I know some people still play it these days, mostly due to social rather than game enjoyment, but on the whole it's not something you want to inflict on yourself.

Honestly... everything after X was pretty bad, in my personal opinion. Early games were pretty amazing, original FF through VI were mostly good, although 2 and 3 were very grindy and we don't discuss Mystic Quest. I personally really didn't like FF 7, however I also acknowledge that for many people, it was their first FF game and so there's the whole nostalgia glasses thing, but I was already in college when FF 7 dropped, and it came on the heels of FF 6 which was simply amazing, so it... left a whole lot to be desired, in my personal experience. 8 was a dumpster fire, it was the very first final fantasy game I never finished, it was that awful. 9 was amazing, but I suppose that this view is because it has so much nostalgia-bait from the first six offerings. If you didn't play the originals, you'd probably miss on at least a quarter of the in-jokes. 10 was okay. I liked the new battle system, I really liked the new skill tree system, the plot was okay-ish (better than 7's or 8's anyway), the minigames were entertaining if a bit grindy... all in all, not a bad offering.

Then we come to the dark side of the franchise. X-2 was a horrible mistake. XI was... the first foray into MMO's and so understandably had many faults. 12 and 13 were just awful, and 15 was... not really what I would recognize as a Final Fantasy game anymore. There's no more fantasy about it. There's almost no magic whatsoever, your magician comes off more as 'mad scientist' than 'arcane prowess', there are no sentient nonhuman races at all, the only thing we find that might be considered fantasy would be the Espers themselves, which despite being a central plot theme are practically marginalized compared to everything else going on.

The only game made post FFX was the FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, at least in my personal opinion. 12, 13, and 15 barely qualified as final fantasy. You could easily remove all of the franchise callbacks and still not change the game in the least, it has that little to do with final fantasy. These three have more of a sci-fi or maybe cyberpunk vibe than fantasy/steampunk. 15, in its attempt to be ultra-realistic, feels more like Final Fantasy: New Vegas. No, wait, that gives its plot too much credit... Final Fantasy: Fallout 4.

[Triaxx]

I don't know. The problem with FF8 I had was the fact that the romance plot felt really forced. Or rather what happened is they doubled it. The awkward teen romance was piled on top of the knight in shining armor romance and they spent the entire game working against one another. Compare 9 which also had a romance central to the greater plot, but it was just one layer, with only the normal awkwardness involved.

On the other hand, the one thing FF8 did really stupendously well was the limit breaks. They took some learning to master, and yet could deal insane damage with tremendous ease. Left+Right, X+O repeat and laugh at the idea of a damage cap.

[Rodin]

I feel like I should explain the bland comment more. Most FFs, I just attack or auto through nearly every encounter, heal between. At least that’s what comes to mind. If there’s a ton of mobs, maybe AoE. It’s just... bland.

Compare this to like Xenoblade or Cosmic Star Heroine or a number of other games.

But ya know, maybe that’s a bit unfair. In the FFs, you have options, just don’t need them. Plus Lightning Returns was exceptionally fun. Suspiciously fun considering its predecessors. One of my single favorite games ever.

The problem comes back to "why are the fights there?" Answer: To drain the resources of the player as they go through the dungeon, and to provide a leveling up mechanic.

In most (if not all, but I admit I'm not wholly familiar with every game) FF game, the two stats that ultimately matter from a resource perspective are HP and MP. If you run out of HP, you're dead. If you run out of MP, you're screwed when it comes time to fight the boss.

Where it gets really tricky is that there are ways to refill both pools. You can use healing items or spells, or you can use Ethers/etc. for MP. You can also sometimes use spells to restore MP, but that isn't universal (for example, Chrono Trigger has no way to do so).

Most players quickly realize the obvious - using a heal spell to restore HP is far more efficient than using items, and can be done out of combat. In addition, healing items are both cheaper and more abundant than magic restoration items.

And so...you just use the Fight command on everything. You kill things slower than if you burned MP and your HP goes down as a result, but you can easily heal that up with Cure spells that cost far less overall than using the MP on offensive spells. Rinse, repeat, etc. I consider it one of the biggest flaws in Chrono Trigger - the fighting system has awesome depth, but it gets horribly underutilized because just auto-attacking everything is so much more efficient.

I suspect this is why the later games (FFXII and on) moved to a more real-time based system. Looking at Cosmic Star Heroine, it looks like the answer they gave to the auto-fight mechanic was to have a number of special abilities that don't require mana? I've seen other games do the same (Darkest Dungeon comes to mind), and that certainly does allow ways to spice things up.

[Aotrs Commander]

There is also the Death spell syndrome (applying to Death and many similar spells), wherein anything that's actually worth using it on (because of the resource cost (MP in FF) is immune to it. (Something that applies to a lot of stuff outside FF, actually, right down to D&D stuff.)

[deuterio12]

There is also the Death spell syndrome (applying to Death and many similar spells), wherein anything that's actually worth using it on (because of the resource cost (MP in FF) is immune to it. (Something that applies to a lot of stuff outside FF, actually, right down to D&D stuff.)

In the other hand plenty of FF enemies have unique weaknesses, like undead can be harmed by healing spells or outright destroyed with ressurection effects, then stuff like omega weapon that is often a random encounter with boss stats but no actual boss immunities. Or applying Berserk to mage enemies to cripple them. Don't see a lot of other games where your ally support double as shutdowns for specific enemies.

Then there was Yojimbo from FF X that had a true insta-kill effect that worked against literally everything including the super-secret-ex-really-final boss, even if it was a bit random to pull it off.

[Erloas]

Then we come to the dark side of the franchise. X-2 was a horrible mistake. XI was... the first foray into MMO's and so understandably had many faults. 12 and 13 were just awful, and 15 was... not really what I would recognize as a Final Fantasy game anymore. There's no more fantasy about it. There's almost no magic whatsoever, your magician comes off more as 'mad scientist' than 'arcane prowess', there are no sentient nonhuman races at all, the only thing we find that might be considered fantasy would be the Espers themselves, which despite being a central plot theme are practically marginalized compared to everything else going on.

The only game made post FFX was the FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, at least in my personal opinion. 12, 13, and 15 barely qualified as final fantasy. You could easily remove all of the franchise callbacks and still not change the game in the least, it has that little to do with final fantasy. These three have more of a sci-fi or maybe cyberpunk vibe than fantasy/steampunk. 15, in its attempt to be ultra-realistic, feels more like Final Fantasy: New Vegas. No, wait, that gives its plot too much credit... Final Fantasy: Fallout 4.
I've been trying to remember the games, I know I've played 7, 10, and 15, and I know I didn't play any of the MMOs but I can't think that I wouldn't have played 8-9. I can't remember much specific about them. At this point there I don't think I could mentally separate any of the older games from the various other JRPGs of the time. So at least to me trying to claim "they aren't even FF games" is about the same as saying "genres aren't allowed to change and adapt."
While modern RPGs are much closer to old school action-adventure games (a genre that doesn't even exist now as far as I can tell), anything that fits the old school RPG games now is generally considered a "tactical" game, with of course the exception of specific indy/Kickstarter games that specifically align themselves to the old definitions.

Also while I can't claim to know most of the oldest games, Final Fantasy as a series has always seemed to have had strong sci-fi and cyberpunk themes and designs. "A future with magic" or "advanced alt-history with magic" is how I would define all the settings. None of them are traditional fantasy. While 15 was a different design in terms of mechanics, the setting still felt very Final Fantasy to me. Especially when you consider how little overlap there is between world design in the other games.

While I fully agree that the plot of 15 made some jumps that weren't really explained and didn't make any sense because of it, I wouldn't say that's out of character with other FF games either.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I've been trying to remember the games, I know I've played 7, 10, and 15, and I know I didn't play any of the MMOs but I can't think that I wouldn't have played 8-9. I can't remember much specific about them. At this point there I don't think I could mentally separate any of the older games from the various other JRPGs of the time. So at least to me trying to claim "they aren't even FF games" is about the same as saying "genres aren't allowed to change and adapt."
While modern RPGs are much closer to old school action-adventure games (a genre that doesn't even exist now as far as I can tell), anything that fits the old school RPG games now is generally considered a "tactical" game, with of course the exception of specific indy/Kickstarter games that specifically align themselves to the old definitions.

Also while I can't claim to know most of the oldest games, Final Fantasy as a series has always seemed to have had strong sci-fi and cyberpunk themes and designs. "A future with magic" or "advanced alt-history with magic" is how I would define all the settings. None of them are traditional fantasy. While 15 was a different design in terms of mechanics, the setting still felt very Final Fantasy to me. Especially when you consider how little overlap there is between world design in the other games.

While I fully agree that the plot of 15 made some jumps that weren't really explained and didn't make any sense because of it, I wouldn't say that's out of character with other FF games either.

I think the problem is that you came in right when the series was, in my opinion, going downhill.

The only sci-fi aspects of any of the games prior to 7 was the City In The Sky, which was clearly LostTech which was from a precursor race and not something in common usage. FF VI had a steampunk vibe, but it was decidedly NOT sci-fi. Even the Magitech armor was kludgy and klunky. Contrast with FFXV in which you are tooling around in your 'Totally not an Impala' car, while calling someone up on your cell phone. Hell, even in FF 7, you only had vehicles in one cutscene and the resulting minigame. There weren't any sci-fi elements in FF 9. In 10, you kind of but not really had the introduction scene, but since that was technically a flashback to a precursor civilization a thousand years prior to the gameplay, it didn't really count, and the Al Bhed just used mostly steampunk level tech.

The biggest problem I had with FFXV is that it felt like it was set in the modern day, although that could simply be the rampant amounts of product placement found (or parodied) within the game. That's really what threw me out of it... for it to be Final Fantasy, it needs to have Fantasy elements, and the world they live in is almost GTA levels grounded in modern day reality. I mean, the plot was awful, there were MANY steps backward taken with regards to many elements of game design, particularly cranking the misogyny up to 'lecherous old japanese dude' levels. You had no playable female characters, except one who was a complete nutjob and an enemy for most of the game up to that point, and even that was strictly temporary in one location. The only other females that had more depth than a cardboard cutout were the girlfriend/fiancee who plays Princess In Need Of Rescue for most of the game, Cid's granddaughter who was 90% Daisy Duke and 10% Pimp Your Ride, and that one forgettable chick who kept all but declaring 'senpai, notice me please!' every time she opened her mouth. Your party consists of dude and his three bros as they drive around the world chillin'. At the very end when... okay, gonna spoiler this...

After your bros sacrifice themselves to give you your shot, and your girl is long dead, you make the sacrifice play as well when you use Knights of the Round. Then you 'wake up' in the afterlife, and it is just you and your bros... your girl is nowhere to be seen in the afterlife where you have the opportunity to hang out with everything you cared about. So you can tool around in RocketCar with your bros, but no ladies in sight... I suppose some might call that an ideal afterlife, but it's pretty shallow.

So yea... I stand by my statement. I'm not saying you are wrong, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. I'm afraid we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I might have enjoyed the game more had it not been titled Final Fantasy XV. If it had been a new franchise... I might've had less to complain about, although the rampant misogyny and tired old 'rescue the princess' plot would still probably have gotten some commentary. But at least I wouldn't be saying 'this is a betrayal of the franchise'... which is pretty much what my rant boils down to.

Every time the car came up, every time he called someone on his cell phone, my immersion went to 0%. I was wondering when he was going to go to the mall to shop at the Gap, not wondering about the world itself.

[Erloas]

Trains, airships, more airships, cars, motorcylces, office buildings, industrial plants, guns, amusement parks, robots, various other mecha, tanks. Those are all things I think of with FF games, some are magicish, some are more contemporary designs, some are very futuristic. They've always seemed to have a pretty good mix of fantasy and sci-fi elements, though clearly more on the fantasy side. (as an aside, not having remembered all the games I did image searches to see how many of those various elements are in various games, it isn't consistent but its not uncommon either. Also a lot of rule34 stuff...)

I totally agree with the complaints about the diversity of FFXV. I see where they were going with the idea of the road trip of friends rather than some thrown together misfit band of adventurers, but it did come with its own problems. There is no justification for the misogamy for sure.

To me the car and phone fit the setting just fine. I'm thinking there was radio communication or some other form of long distance communication in the others but can't remember specifically. Given the robots and airships a phone doesn't seem that out of place. The car is fine too because there are similar types of transportation in the other games, they usually either just make you wait for it, give it and then take it away, use it for a level or two (as in background, like a train or airship, the levels are the transportation), or show other people with it and you don't get it.
Clearly not a design choice everyone is going to agree on, but the idea of a car in a FF setting is not out of place.

I remember her showing up in the ending. You guys being together in the throne room. It is possible that wasn't the original or only ending, it was the ending I saw when I played it though, a while after release

[BeerMug Paladin]

The only sci-fi aspects of any of the games prior to 7 was the City In The Sky, which was clearly LostTech which was from a precursor race and not something in common usage. FF VI had a steampunk vibe, but it was decidedly NOT sci-fi. Even the Magitech armor was kludgy and klunky. Contrast with FFXV in which you are tooling around in your 'Totally not an Impala' car, while calling someone up on your cell phone. Hell, even in FF 7, you only had vehicles in one cutscene and the resulting minigame. There weren't any sci-fi elements in FF 9. In 10, you kind of but not really had the introduction scene, but since that was technically a flashback to a precursor civilization a thousand years prior to the gameplay, it didn't really count, and the Al Bhed just used mostly steampunk level tech.
Time travel isn't a sci-fi thing?
Also, steampunk isn't sci-fi?
Creating super-soldiers in a lab experiment isn't sci-fi either?

I'm not sure you have the same idea of those things as I do.

However, I will agree that the latter FF games do place more and more of an emphasis on a sort of magical/technological hodgepodge sort of setting. But I was under the impression that's more to do with having a better art/design budget and not very much to do with drifting away from the core of the series. Those game development teams are just led by an overzealous art department. Sort of like Naughty Dog, but with a more strict science-fantasy bent.

[Cespenar]

As a prime example of how you could do final fantasy style battles and still make it tactically interesting, there is this little gem called Epic Battle Fantasy.

[Kato]

As a prime example of how you could do final fantasy style battles and still make it tactically interesting, there is this little gem called Epic Battle Fantasy.

I like EBF's combat very much but I see little difference to FF's on average. (the early-mid games, that is)
I guess the former feels more tactical because you get a lot of information and can / are encouraged to be more strategic rather than use brute force, but in most FF games using a decent strategy is just as helpful and if you want to you can brute force your way through large parts of EBF as well.

[Knaight]

That makes it easy to call most of the combat "boring", because there can't be a lot of enemy variety in each area due to time, memory, and theming constraints, and most of the combat has to be limited in terms of player engagement.

You kinda have to judge how interesting the combat in a JRPG is by the bosses rather than the day to day enemies.

So it's boring, but that's okay, because if you judge it only by the parts which aren't guaranteed to be boring it may end up interesting (or not). This isn't a particularly compelling argument for it not being boring.

Plus even if there are limits to the combat from a lack of enemy variety or the lack of real threat there are ways to still make the core systems fun to interact with. See: Baten Kaitos.

[TaRix]

So it's boring, but that's okay, because if you judge it only by the parts which aren't guaranteed to be boring it may end up interesting (or not). This isn't a particularly compelling argument for it not being boring.

Plus even if there are limits to the combat from a lack of enemy variety or the lack of real threat there are ways to still make the core systems fun to interact with. See: Baten Kaitos.

Make it Baten Kaitos II: The Prequel. The first one got kind of clunky and the second was faster and more fun to use.

[Cespenar]

I like EBF's combat very much but I see little difference to FF's on average. (the early-mid games, that is)
I guess the former feels more tactical because you get a lot of information and can / are encouraged to be more strategic rather than use brute force, but in most FF games using a decent strategy is just as helpful and if you want to you can brute force your way through large parts of EBF as well.

The first parts, maybe, but the mid-late game, especially on Hard difficulty and further, is leagues ahead from FFs in the tactical sense. It's not that the information you get is more or less -- it's just that you have a lot more options, and they mostly don't make each other redundant by doing the same thing but better.

[Hunter Noventa]

There is also the Death spell syndrome (applying to Death and many similar spells), wherein anything that's actually worth using it on (because of the resource cost (MP in FF) is immune to it. (Something that applies to a lot of stuff outside FF, actually, right down to D&D stuff.)

Ah yes, the good old Useless Useful Spell (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UselessUsefulSpell).

Though some of the FF games handle it better than others. FFV was pretty notable for having lots of weird stuff you could do with status effects, such as manipulating the enemy's level so you could utilize Level 5 Death on them and stuff like that. Or being able to use a Gold Needle to instantly kill animated statues.

The Tactics games also made status effects MUCH more useful. It was totally viable and useful to actually cast spells like Petrify and paralyze, and they'd hit often enough to matter.

And then in 8, you could junction status effects to your attack to make regular encounters a breeze...though if you know that much about the system, you're just refining magic and then using Enc-None to avoid the random battles.

[Anteros]

It's a bit silly to pick up a franchise that's mostly 20 years old and complain that the mechanics are boring. They were mostly fine for their time while the newer entries to the franchise are very different. I don't see how anyone could claim that combat in FFXV is boring unless they simply don't like action games.



I totally agree with the complaints about the diversity of FFXV. I see where they were going with the idea of the road trip of friends rather than some thrown together misfit band of adventurers, but it did come with its own problems. There is no justification for the misogamy for sure.


The idea that the game is misogynistic at all is insane. Are we really so sensitive that we literally can't have a game about men on a road trip together without it being tied to some sinister motive? I'm curious where all these complaints were for the multiple Final Fantasies with all female protagonists. I guess Tumblr wasn't as offended by that.

Also, you guys seem really confused about the ending of the game. The Bros don't die at all, and Noctis is chilling in heaven with his new bride. Shneekey is literally just complaining that the game let's you run around the map after the end credits. Of course your bride isn't there for that. She wasn't a controllable character in the game. Trying way too hard to be offended.

[Knaight]

Make it Baten Kaitos II: The Prequel. The first one got kind of clunky and the second was faster and more fun to use.

I'd disagree with that (the whole combo system wasn't really my jam), but sure, why not. It also has a combat system that is just fun to use, even when losing isn't really on the table unless you play really poorly, which is also the case in every FF (spamming Defense every single turn to take reduced damage will eventually get you killed by anything).

[Erloas]

It's a bit silly to pick up a franchise that's mostly 20 years old and complain that the mechanics are boring. They were mostly fine for their time while the newer entries to the franchise are very different. I don't see how anyone could claim that combat in FFXV is boring unless they simply don't like action games.I can't talk for everyone, but I'm trying to judge the games by their time. Although I would say that for the most part JRPGs were never known for their combat, they made up for their combat by the story. The combat was designed around the boss fights and most normal encounters were not much more than time-sinks and gateways to certain areas (in the more open world settings). There was almost nothing worse than having to grind levels in a JRPG because the next area you need to go is too high level for you.
I think that is ultimately the issue with the combat: Is it serving a story purpose? Is it one of the most engaging part of the game design? Is it trivial and just there to up the playtime?




The idea that the game is misogynistic at all is insane. Are we really so sensitive that we literally can't have a game about men on a road trip together without it being tied to some sinister motive? I'm curious where all these complaints were for the multiple Final Fantasies with all female protagonists. I guess Tumblr wasn't as offended by that.
What I specifically said was that the choice in team lead to a lack of diversity. While the characters each have their own background specifics and personality, they've all known each other their whole lives and have a lot of overlap in their background and come from similar areas. They simply aren't that diverse and delving into their backgrounds is primarily done around how they relate to each other.
It isn't that there aren't women in positions of power in the setting or that they don't have their own stories, but that we only hear about their background in how it relates to and is seen from the perspective of the male main characters. The skilled and most developed of the female secondary characters is also clearly sexualized for no apparent reason, to the point where it wouldn't even start to make sense in her chosen career.
The problem isn't that all the main characters were male, it was that to get some balance there needed to be a lot more done with the secondary characters and that wasn't really done. Getting away from just gender diversity, well there almost isn't any diversity.

[Triaxx]

Except, the lack of diversity is entirely reasonable. Groups form by nature from commonalities. Computer Clubs, Science clubs, sports teams, are similar by nature of a common interest. You don't join a Soccer team if you're interested in playing Baseball. Being friends means they would have done a lot together, and so it's not a lack of diversity, but a glut of commonality.

[Anteros]

I can't talk for everyone, but I'm trying to judge the games by their time. Although I would say that for the most part JRPGs were never known for their combat, they made up for their combat by the story. The combat was designed around the boss fights and most normal encounters were not much more than time-sinks and gateways to certain areas (in the more open world settings). There was almost nothing worse than having to grind levels in a JRPG because the next area you need to go is too high level for you.
I think that is ultimately the issue with the combat: Is it serving a story purpose? Is it one of the most engaging part of the game design? Is it trivial and just there to up the playtime?


[LEFT][COLOR=#222222][FONT=Verdana]
What I specifically said was that the choice in team lead to a lack of diversity. While the characters each have their own background specifics and personality, they've all known each other their whole lives and have a lot of overlap in their background and come from similar areas. They simply aren't that diverse and delving into their backgrounds is primarily done around how they relate to each other.
It isn't that there aren't women in positions of power in the setting or that they don't have their own stories, but that we only hear about their background in how it relates to and is seen from the perspective of the male main characters. The skilled and most developed of the female secondary characters is also clearly sexualized for no apparent reason, to the point where it wouldn't even start to make sense in her chosen career.
The problem isn't that all the main characters were male, it was that to get some balance there needed to be a lot more done with the secondary characters and that wasn't really done. Getting away from just gender diversity, well there almost isn't any diversity.

Everyone is sexualized "for no apparent reason". The male cast looks like they were ripped directly off the cover of either a boy band CD, or a smutty romance novel.

I'll agree that the main cast isn't diverse, but I disagree that that's inherently a bad thing. It's not a game about making friends or meeting new people. The plot is about a group of childhood friends on a road trip. Having a group of male characters is no more misogynistic than having a group of female protagonists in other games is mysandrist. Sure, they could have made Ignis gay, Gladiolus black, and turned Prompto into a female to check off some PC checklist for diversity, but that would have gone against the base aesthetic that the game is going for.

I know representation in media is important. People want to be able to identify with characters that are similar to them. Kids like to look at their heroes and imagine themselves in their place. I get it. That said, not every piece of media has to be specifically tailored to represent everyone.

[danzibr]

I think Gladiolus gay, Prompto black, and Ignis female is a better fit.

[Erloas]

Everyone is sexualized "for no apparent reason". The male cast looks like they were ripped directly off the cover of either a boy band CD, or a smutty romance novel.

I'll agree that the main cast isn't diverse, but I disagree that that's inherently a bad thing. It's not a game about making friends or meeting new people. The plot is about a group of childhood friends on a road trip. Having a group of male characters is no more misogynistic than having a group of female protagonists in other games is mysandrist. Sure, they could have made Ignis gay, Gladiolus black, and turned Prompto into a female to check off some PC checklist for diversity, but that would have gone against the base aesthetic that the game is going for.

I know representation in media is important. People want to be able to identify with characters that are similar to them. Kids like to look at their heroes and imagine themselves in their place. I get it. That said, not every piece of media has to be specifically tailored to represent everyone.
While the majority of the characters are attractive, it is really only Cindy that is sexualized, though Gladiolus clearly has the beefcake abs always being shown off thing going on, the fact that he is developed to more than that and at least has some story to back up the look. He also doesn't have someone like Prompto commenting on him all the time.
I also clearly said that it wasn't inherently bad, but simply that it skews the view and presentation of the story and they didn't do much to balance that out.
It is more than who the main characters are. They also had a few cut-scene back stories and character development and those can, and often are, done from the point of view of the minor characters themselves, or at the very least a neutral playback of all characters involved.
As for the comparison for all female leads, I'm not sure I know of any that are more than one character, but even with female leads it isn't uncommon for them to be sexualized in the process and at least of the games I've played I can't think of any story where the men are more sexualized than the women. It is more than just the main characters, as I've said.

It didn't come across as overly misogynistic when I played, though Cindy clearly stood out, but it was very clearly told from a dominantly masculine point of view. It could have been a lot worse for sure, but it could have been better too. I like the game, but I can see and admit to its shortcomings as well.

[Rodin]

I can't talk for everyone, but I'm trying to judge the games by their time. Although I would say that for the most part JRPGs were never known for their combat, they made up for their combat by the story. The combat was designed around the boss fights and most normal encounters were not much more than time-sinks and gateways to certain areas (in the more open world settings). There was almost nothing worse than having to grind levels in a JRPG because the next area you need to go is too high level for you.
I think that is ultimately the issue with the combat: Is it serving a story purpose? Is it one of the most engaging part of the game design? Is it trivial and just there to up the playtime?

The Final Fantasies in general weren't too bad about level-grinding from what I recall. Certain areas are tougher than others, but there was always a path through the game where you were progressing without explicitly level grinding. The exception is the optional "post-game" content - to take on Ultima Weapon, you need to grind, but it's not mandatory to beat the game. That's where I felt Bravely Default fell down - you reach a point in the game where you literally CANNOT progress without hours of walking around fighting enemies for no other purpose than to let you progress to the next time loop, where you start the process all over again.

[DomaDoma]

I remember a LOT of level-grinding toward the end of games six and nine. At least game nine made it more interesting, a worldwide collection spree for skills and artifacts. Game six was just "I'm not ready for the Phoenix Caves or the Dinosaur Forest or the final dungeon, I'll just whack praying mantises outside Jidoor for the next three hours."

[Maryring]

Considering Aranea introduces herself boobs first with a flirt when she starts her boss fight, I can't really agree that Cindy is the only one sexualized. Honestly, there's no problem having the whole main team be guys. It could make for an interesting story, and the team setup makes sense. XV's problem with females isn't that. It's that none of the females really matter. !NotYuna only exists to empower and motivate Noctis. Cindy to be sexy and upgrade the car. Iris to awkwardly flirt around as a childhood crush. And Aranea...

Actually, Aranea isn't so bad. While she's certainly one to... ahem, make an entrance, she's got clear motivations and actions that don't totally revolve around the boyband protagonists.

Also FFXIII thirteen has terrible time-wasting combat, where you make almost no decisions. Even the paradigm swaps aren't so much decisions as calculations. Buffs ran out, swap to synergist. Health is low. Swap to medic. Enemy broken, swap to Cerberus. In between that, you just press the same button over and over, because the game makes the terrible choice of having autocombat that forces you to participate in the monotonous button pressing. There's no reason whatsoever to not use autocombat until the end-game, and even then, it's really only Vanilla Icecream who has an interesting limit break.

[Kato]

Wish I could contribute to the XV discussion but I need to upgrade my hardware first :smallsigh:

I do agree that early FF can be beaten with far less grinding than many people claim but not rarely this requires you to know the game well. Also, if you can beat Dark Cloud without grinding you either hacked the game or trained without grinding, somehow..
But in pretty much every other, as long as you do some side quests and know what you're doing you don't need grinding.

Also... I'm confused when people act as if Paradigms were not part of XIII's combat. I mean, you are free to complain about how well these work, but they ARE the central combat mechanic of the game. Instead of bringing along a white mage, you bring more or less with medics, if you're planning to tank, you bring more sentinels.. Nobody intends you to hastily pick spells and skills in the fast paced combat (once your speed really picks up, and that you still kind of have to I actually think is confusing). The important thing is to bring in the right paradigms, switch at the right moment, and maybe do some minor things to adjust the flow of combat.

[JeenLeen]

I never found combat boring (while playing through it the first time, at least), but I can see the argument to it being bland.

I think FF6 was one of the least bland, since the special abilities of the different characters had different feels. I guess you could focus just on Fight and Magic, but you could make combat interesting.

I think FF8 is the most bland, but for different reasons than most mention. (It's also the most boring in retrospect.) I did the Junctioning thing, but all I really needed to do was summon and have my Guardian Force kill everything. Mid-to-late game, I think I did get a team that could easily kill non-bosses quicker than a summon, but that wasn't for most of the game. I think boss battles were the only place where I used tricks like limit breaks.
I'm really surprised to hear folk saying the players were interchangable due to Junctioning. While completely true, everyone I knew who played the game just focused on GFs. My friends thought it was boring, but it was less boring than optimizing junctioning.

I really liked FF7 when I played it the few years after it came out, but it's aged poorly. The loading time for the attack bar, early in the game when your stats are low, is just too long. I wish they had done something like keep its speed relative to the speed of your foes -- but I can see the programming difficulty for something like that. And it occludes your speed increasing as you level up.

I really enjoyed the automated combat of FFXII, but that's because I stink at and thus dislike live action games. I was able to enjoy the story without really worrying about combat, since I had things on auto-pilot for 90% of the fights. While very bland, it was enjoyable to me since it let me focus on the fun stuff.

Hmm... thinking back, the original Final Fantasy might be the one where I had to put the most thought into combat. From team composition to the strategy to survive with said team composition, and each fight usually had some strong thoughts to resource costs (HP, spell slots, or items). Though it did get rather tedious, but that was common to most JRPGs of that day. It wasn't the most fun, but it certainly had me thinking most fights.

[Rodin]

I remember a LOT of level-grinding toward the end of games six and nine. At least game nine made it more interesting, a worldwide collection spree for skills and artifacts. Game six was just "I'm not ready for the Phoenix Caves or the Dinosaur Forest or the final dungeon, I'll just whack praying mantises outside Jidoor for the next three hours."

Huh, not my experience at all for 6. My recent replay of it (with challenge rules on to make it harder) had me attempt the Cultist tower and bounce, so I went and did the Phoenix Caves instead prior to even having Cure 3 on any of my characters. Admittedly, I never bother with the Dinosaur Forest because there's no reason to go there, plot-wise. It's just a little patch of forest with unusually difficult enemies in that give good rewards - hardly required level grinding. I need to go back and finish that run, but so far I've picked up every character other than Gogo without revisiting any area. I haven't even hung out on the Veldt as much as I should. The only other area I haven't been to yet is the underground ruins to pick up Odin.

I need to go back and finish that run to see how tough Kefka's Tower is, but I don't recall it being all that bad.

[Hunter Noventa]

6 isn't far behind 5 in terms of the gimmicks you can use to break the game over your knee, even without glitches. 5's final boss basically has one really nasty attack you need enough HP to survive (and its damage is reduced by Shell), and the rest is status ailments or can be mitigated with items/white magic no matter your level.

I don't remember how tough 6 is, its been a long time since I played it, but once you realize you get stat ups based on your esper, it's mostly a matter of specializing stats and learning the right magic, which doesn't take a huge amount of grinding, if I recall.

[JeenLeen]

I don't remember how tough 6 is, its been a long time since I played it, but once you realize you get stat ups based on your esper, it's mostly a matter of specializing stats and learning the right magic, which doesn't take a huge amount of grinding, if I recall.

One friend of mine's who is a huge optimizer felt compelled to not level up at all until he got espers. For him, the game was really tough, though that is apparently doable. (Boss fights and mandatory fights don't give xp, it seems, and he ran from everything else.)

One of the earlier FFs -- I forget which, but your stats rose and fell depending on what you did in combat -- I found real tedious to build a strong PC. I remember grinding to boost HP by having my folk attack themselves.
Biggest disappointment, though, was that I was doing fine against all normal enemies and decent against bosses, and the final boss destroyed me quickly. I had sold the weapon he was weak to (since nothing indicates it is worthwhile to hold on to) and didn't feel like grinding to level up, so never beat that one.
BUT I suppose the actual fighting wasn't too bland. You could build interesting characters and diversify. Just it was annoying to get your team good.

[Talion]

One friend of mine's who is a huge optimizer felt compelled to not level up at all until he got espers. For him, the game was really tough, though that is apparently doable. (Boss fights and mandatory fights don't give xp, it seems, and he ran from everything else.)

One of the earlier FFs -- I forget which, but your stats rose and fell depending on what you did in combat -- I found real tedious to build a strong PC. I remember grinding to boost HP by having my folk attack themselves.
Biggest disappointment, though, was that I was doing fine against all normal enemies and decent against bosses, and the final boss destroyed me quickly. I had sold the weapon he was weak to (since nothing indicates it is worthwhile to hold on to) and didn't feel like grinding to level up, so never beat that one.
BUT I suppose the actual fighting wasn't too bland. You could build interesting characters and diversify. Just it was annoying to get your team good.

That was FF II; I remember it distinctly because when I was younger I didn't know how to progress the story (IE to go and talk to Scott by going around the town wall and to the oddly placed inn) and basically just grinded until I was one-shotting the guards occupying Fynn. Only got around to actually playing it all the way through last year.

[Hunter Noventa]

That was FF II; I remember it distinctly because when I was younger I didn't know how to progress the story (IE to go and talk to Scott by going around the town wall and to the oddly placed inn) and basically just grinded until I was one-shotting the guards occupying Fynn. Only got around to actually playing it all the way through last year.

Yes, FFII was weird as heck. The best way to get more HP was to hit yourself, and there was a glitch to level up anything by canceling out, because the point towards leveling was recorded when you selected a target, and then not taken back if the action was cancelled.

[Ninja_Prawn]

I started with FFX (still my favourite, except for the Tactics games) and have since played I, II, III, VII, VIII, a tiny bit of IX, X-2, XII, XIII, XIII-2, XV, Tactics Advance, Tactics War of the Lions, Dissidia and Opera Omnia.

My feeling is that combat in FF really went downhill after X. It's as if someone told the higher ups at Square Enix "it's the 21st century, turn-based combat is dead" and they reacted by firing all of their old designers (who went on to produce the brilliant Lost Odyssey) and trying to find a way to shoehorn action-adventure combat into FF.

Everything after X feels like a failed experiment. X-2 didn't go down well with the fans (though I liked it personally). XII had some clever ideas but just wasn't fun. XIII had one sort-of-clever idea that wasn't sufficient to hang a combat system off of. XV is painfully boring and doesn't seem like an FF game at all. Maybe they're right that the old combat system has had its day, but they definitely haven't found anything better to replace it with.

[JeenLeen]

I don't really have time to get into gaming like I used to, but I agree with Ninja_Prawn. I like turn-based combat (and FF7 is close enough to turn-based for me to be equivalent.) That they've gone away from that is one of the big turn-offs of later games. I could tolerate XIII due to gambits, aka, autopilot. XV looks awesome, but I don't think I'd enjoy the combat.

[Hunter Noventa]

I started with FFX (still my favourite, except for the Tactics games) and have since played I, II, III, VII, VIII, a tiny bit of IX, X-2, XII, XIII, XIII-2, XV, Tactics Advance, Tactics War of the Lions, Dissidia and Opera Omnia.

My feeling is that combat in FF really went downhill after X. It's as if someone told the higher ups at Square Enix "it's the 21st century, turn-based combat is dead" and they reacted by firing all of their old designers (who went on to produce the brilliant Lost Odyssey) and trying to find a way to shoehorn action-adventure combat into FF.

Everything after X feels like a failed experiment. X-2 didn't go down well with the fans (though I liked it personally). XII had some clever ideas but just wasn't fun. XIII had one sort-of-clever idea that wasn't sufficient to hang a combat system off of. XV is painfully boring and doesn't seem like an FF game at all. Maybe they're right that the old combat system has had its day, but they definitely haven't found anything better to replace it with.

X-2 probably had the best iteration of the ATB system ever devised, but it was marred more by how awful the game's plot was than anything.

[GloatingSwine]

That was FF II; I remember it distinctly because when I was younger I didn't know how to progress the story (IE to go and talk to Scott by going around the town wall and to the oddly placed inn) and basically just grinded until I was one-shotting the guards occupying Fynn. Only got around to actually playing it all the way through last year.

Punching yourself in the face for hitpoints was the newbie way to break FF2.

The pro strat was as soon as you got the canoe and could meet an enemy that wouldn't run away (the bird thing) equip everyone with two shields and grind your shield skill to 16. As soon as you did that then as long as you had a shield equipped and no armour on you could not be hit by any physical attack in the game, meaning only very very rare enemies that used magic could hurt you at all.

[JeenLeen]

Punching yourself in the face for hitpoints was the newbie way to break FF2.

The pro strat was as soon as you got the canoe and could meet an enemy that wouldn't run away (the bird thing) equip everyone with two shields and grind your shield skill to 16. As soon as you did that then as long as you had a shield equipped and no armour on you could not be hit by any physical attack in the game, meaning only very very rare enemies that used magic could hurt you at all.

I forget if it was FFII or another one, but in one of the early ones the enemies were pretty dumb as to what attacks they'd use. By this I particularly mean that, if you drained all their MP, they'd still try to cast spells.

Except the final boss.
So when I was trying to beat him despite being outclassed, one time I tried draining his MP away since I noticed he casts big spells every few rounds. But, unlike other enemies, he just started doing his (almost killing me in one hit) punches every round.

Wish I knew that Shield trick. I might've beaten it.

[tyckspoon]

I think FF6 was one of the least bland, since the special abilities of the different characters had different feels. I guess you could focus just on Fight and Magic, but you could make combat interesting.

I think FF8 is the most bland, but for different reasons than most mention. (It's also the most boring in retrospect.) I did the Junctioning thing, but all I really needed to do was summon and have my Guardian Force kill everything. Mid-to-late game, I think I did get a team that could easily kill non-bosses quicker than a summon, but that wasn't for most of the game. I think boss battles were the only place where I used tricks like limit breaks.
I'm really surprised to hear folk saying the players were interchangable due to Junctioning. While completely true, everyone I knew who played the game just focused on GFs. My friends thought it was boring, but it was less boring than optimizing junctioning.


6's character-unique commands had the main problem that some of them were amazing or generally useful (Sabin's Blitz, some of Edgar's Tools.. that's.. actually kind of it. You can get good use out of Dance and Rage, but you don't want to use them in really hard fights because that stops you from having Mog or Gau doing anything else.) And then most of them .. aren't. Runic doesn't do any good if you're not getting hit with qualifying magic attacks, Terra's Trance literally just makes her Fight and Magic commands better, Slots are roughly about the same as an ok magic attack with a funky mechanism (unless you're abusing the game to force the instant-kill result, in which case it's borkened as heck), Sword Techs take so long to charge that you could have just attacked normally for much the same result in most cases, and Strago's most useful/usable Blue spells aren't much different from normal magic attacks anyway aside from giving you access to a couple elements (primarily water with Aqua Rake) that aren't represented in the standard learnable spells. Sketch/Control is pretty handy in random encounters, although what it's best at is making the game bug out.

So unless you happen to be Sabin or Edgar, most of a character's contribution to a fight is gonna be Fight or Magic anyways. It doesn't help that it's pretty easy to make those two commands massively stronger than any of the other character uniques. (Dual-wield any two good weapons + level Strength, level Magic + the dualcast relic, Quick spell chaining, 1-MP cost Ultimas, the quad-attack relic + Setzer's Fixed Dice that ignore defense and attack strength and just do a randomly rolled amount of damage that averages in the thousands per attack..)

For FF8, my favorite abuse was when I realized that the game randomly gives access to the limit break commands every time a characters turn comes up.. and it rechecks that if you hit the 'skip turn, go to next available character' button. So I'd usually have somebody with a good Limit Break command (Zell, Squall, Irvine usually) going around at 'low' health (if you had 9000+ HP you could be at 'critical' status and still have like 2k HP buffer, so not really a major threat) and just cycle their turns until they could Limit Break. Assuming that it wasn't something you could just 1-shot with 100 Death Status-Attack. You could also have one full-health character wandering around with dead party members, since that's the other major factor that increases the 'desperation' level and increases the chance and quality (number of hits in Renzokuken/time to fire shells/input beat commands/chance to use a Renzokuken finishing special/etc) of a Limit Break. No need to waste turns and spell stocks casting Aura on people.

[Anteros]

While the majority of the characters are attractive, it is really only Cindy that is sexualized, though Gladiolus clearly has the beefcake abs always being shown off thing going on, the fact that he is developed to more than that and at least has some story to back up the look. He also doesn't have someone like Prompto commenting on him all the time.
I also clearly said that it wasn't inherently bad, but simply that it skews the view and presentation of the story and they didn't do much to balance that out.
It is more than who the main characters are. They also had a few cut-scene back stories and character development and those can, and often are, done from the point of view of the minor characters themselves, or at the very least a neutral playback of all characters involved.
As for the comparison for all female leads, I'm not sure I know of any that are more than one character, but even with female leads it isn't uncommon for them to be sexualized in the process and at least of the games I've played I can't think of any story where the men are more sexualized than the women. It is more than just the main characters, as I've said.

It didn't come across as overly misogynistic when I played, though Cindy clearly stood out, but it was very clearly told from a dominantly masculine point of view. It could have been a lot worse for sure, but it could have been better too. I like the game, but I can see and admit to its shortcomings as well.

I'll agree that lots of things about the game could be better. It's definitely not without its flaws. I just feel like it gets a lot of undeserved hate because some people took one look at the cast and decided they hated it without knowing anything else about it. The game got a ton of hate before it even released.

[Erloas]

The combat mechanics debate in general is one I'm not sure which was to go. While I love the turned based combat of old games like Fallout 1&2 and new versions in the same design like Wastelands 2, I can also see the reason why so many games have changed to other styles. What I've found I don't like is when they try to blend action combat and turn based combat, I've yet to find a system like that which actually works. For instance I couldn't stand Dragon Age's semi-programmed real-time pausable combat system and I would always switch Fallout Tactics to straight turn based. I'm thinking one of the FF games did similar but I can't remember which specific one or if I'm remembering some other JRPG series.
I've played plenty of action based RPGs that I've very much enjoyed the combat, though I would also hesitate to really call the combat RPG combat. Action game with RPG elements, or RPG game with action combat seems to be how I would see them. Knowing full well that anyone that hasn't been playing games since the 80s would almost not recognize what I see as defining RPG combat unless they've focused a lot on "retro" gaming.

So while I completely accept FF's switch with XV, that they need to try new things and change. I would also say it is, mechanically speaking, missing most of what I would define as a JPRG.

It always runs into the catch 22 of "they're just releasing essentially the same game over and over again" and "this game is completely different from the rest of the series, they've changed everything I loved about them."

I think in reality what it comes down to is that there is still a very large market for "retro" style game mechanics, but it doesn't have to be tied to isometric or sprite based graphics. I think an AAA game from traditional publishers can take a lot more variety than upper management wants to acknowledge.

[JeenLeen]

6's character-unique commands had the main problem that some of them were amazing or generally useful (Sabin's Blitz, some of Edgar's Tools.. that's.. actually kind of it.
[...]
Sketch/Control is pretty handy in random encounters, although what it's best at is making the game bug out.

Yeah, I can agree with you. I was mainly thinking of Sabin and Edgar.
I was lucky with Sketch in that, when it bugged me out, I freaked and ran away. Wound up with 99 or infinite (as in, still had 99 no matter how many I used) of several items in my inventory. Throw got a LOT better when I had 99 Atma Weapons and Excaliburs to throw.

From what I've heard of other results that bug gave, I was pretty fortunate.

[GloatingSwine]

I think in reality what it comes down to is that there is still a very large market for "retro" style game mechanics, but it doesn't have to be tied to isometric or sprite based graphics. I think an AAA game from traditional publishers can take a lot more variety than upper management wants to acknowledge.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEqOoml7D7I

Squeenix know that.

[Cespenar]

I'm not sure if the tricks which are being talked about in FF8 are being done so in a positive or negative light, but personally, I find it an indication of a fun system when the newbie can play with relative challenge while the veterans could find multiple ways to break the game. FF8 was one of the few instances where I could tolerate the combats of a FF game.

[Wookieetank]

Played all the mainline FFs and a few of the sideline FFs.

Much as I like the scale of a lot of the fights in XV (mountain adamantoise was absurdly entertaining even if it did take me 5 hours to beat), I found that 95% plus of the fights could be beaten just by holding down circle and popping potions as needed. Not that terribly exciting. Or you could cast a spell and one shot everything non-boss/elite. Really the lack of available magic options was disappointing. 3 elements and then tagging on extra effects if you had the items for it, when multicast is the only useful one. Why poison something when you can hit it 5 times with fire in one cast?

I'll second XIV as having quite interesting combat, and each class plays very differently to provide a lot of variety (at least for now, not so sure about some of this talk of re-balancing everything and making all skills available to everyone so that no one class has a benefit over another. Really hoping they don't go through with this).

At least in XIII & XIII-2 you had to know when to swap up your paradigm and learning how to stagger the enemies added some variety to the fights despite the lack of control.

I quite liked XII myself, but trying to setup proper gambits was interesting to me, and trying to make uber limitbreak chains was fun.

XI is kinda a mess, and losing xp on death was so painful. I ended up quitting after seeing level 15 from 16 for like the 8th time in a day of playing.

X was good, and the sphere grid was neat. Would love to see another turn based game with that style of character growth.

IX and below don't really have much to add. Favorites being V, VI, VII & IX. One of my biggest issues with VIII outside of the already mentioned ones, was the lifeless monochromatic dull unchangeable menu color. It was just so soul searingly depressing.

[Ninja_Prawn]

lifeless monochromatic dull unchangeable menu color. It was just so soul searingly depressing.

HAH!

Kind of fits Squall's character though, eh?

[Wookieetank]

HAH!

Kind of fits Squall's character though, eh?

It does, but I so wanted to change it to the blue that IV, V, VI, VII & IX used. Would've made the game so much more enjoyable.

[Erloas]

Much as I like the scale of a lot of the fights in XV (mountain adamantoise was absurdly entertaining even if it did take me 5 hours to beat), I found that 95% plus of the fights could be beaten just by holding down circle and popping potions as needed. Not that terribly exciting. Or you could cast a spell and one shot everything non-boss/elite. Really the lack of available magic options was disappointing. 3 elements and then tagging on extra effects if you had the items for it, when multicast is the only useful one. Why poison something when you can hit it 5 times with fire in one cast?
I found the biggest limitation of magic was that it hit your own people, so it was essentially impossible to use without setting your friends on fire or freezing them. I found the status effects about as useful as in most RPGs, namely, not very. As in pretty much every RPG the every day mooks that you fight are never too much of a threat and straight up damage is usually the best thing to do.
As for mashing a single button to win combat, that's sort of missing the point. 99% of FPS games are essentially "won" with a single button, that is sort of ignoring everything else. I actually can't think of many games at all where you couldn't win the majority of fights with a single skill, you use more skills and combos because it is more entertaining and more effective, not because it is strictly necessary. The game wasn't exceptionally difficult for sure, but I couldn't see the game being improved by making all of the combat last a lot longer or spending a bunch of extra prep time between battles.



XI is kinda a mess, and losing xp on death was so painful. I ended up quitting after seeing level 15 from 16 for like the 8th time in a day of playing.
XP loss on death was standard practice for MMOs at that point in time. It was better than item loss, which wasn't that uncommon for the time. That was always a tricky balance for MMOs, making death mean enough to be avoided, but not being too punishing. I find it equally as annoying in games where people kill themselves simply for quick travel, which is what we see a lot in games without any (noticeable) penalty for death.

[Ninja_Prawn]

It does, but I so wanted to change it to the blue that IV, V, VI, VII & IX used. Would've made the game so much more enjoyable.

Oh, but imagine if they do an HD remaster of VIII... I bet they could make that grey look amazing!

[Triaxx]

I liked the grey? I liked all the FF's.

[Gnoman]

I liked the grey enough in VIII. It really fit the whole industrial look of a lot of the designs. I usually change the menu to gray when I play VII for the same reasons.

[Anteros]

For all the hate the newer FFs get I've liked several of them. 15 is just a fun game to play. Teleporting around in combat and summoning swords or giant axes to kill enemies is fun. Sure, you could get through most of the game without exploring the combat system, but why would you? Do you intentionally try to avoid the most fun part of games?

FFXIII is another where I enjoyed the combat system. It has a tactical depth that other Final Fantasies lack. It does suffer from having half the cast be completely unlikable, but that's not a failing of the combat system.

FFXIII-2 is basically FFXIII with pokemon added on. I didn't love it and I didn't hate it. The plot was very dumb, but again, that's not a failing of the combat.

11 and 14 were boring and shallow, but they're MMOs so I don't really count them. 12 was awful. I have no interest in 4 hour long boss fights, and no time for them even if they did interest me.

[Psyren]

I first played FF 1-6 on emulators when I was much younger and had little else to play. Thanks to frameskip and savestates, the combat grind wasn't soul-crushingly tedious - I could put all the fights on fast-forward and level quickly.

It wasn't until FF7, where I couldn't do that, that I realized I had never actually enjoyed JRPG menu-based combat. I loved the characters, and the plot, and the setting, but the combat was just an obstacle to me getting there, barring the first time I got to see a shiny new spell or esper in action - but even that sense of novelty wore off quickly. FF7 was similar - watching Bahamut or Knights of the Round go off the first couple of times was amazing, but after you've seen it 5 times or more it got old fast.

But not all JRPGs fell into this trap. Chrono Trigger and Earthbound kept the combat enjoyable by making it avoidable; instead of encouners being purely random, you could see them coming and, with skill, do less of them. Earthbound in particular had the most genius system I'd ever seen in a JRPG - whereby if you significantly outlevel the enemies in a given zone, they actually run from you, and if you do walk into one (because it's attempts to flee have made it block your path) the game simply goes "Given your level, we know you'd win this fight anyway, so let's skip it and give you the rewards."

Anyway, the experimentation the genre has been doing with games like FFXV/Nier, and the positive reception to that, fills me with hope. Not every JRPG needs action-based combat of course - certainly the mobile ones don't - but I think experimenting in this arena can result in a gameplay experience as rich as what WRPGs have been able to deliver on.

[Ninja_Prawn]

the mobile ones

Can I just say, I've been really digging Opera Omnia lately. The cynical power creep is annoying, but you can enjoy the game well enough without needing to put any money into it, so it's only a minor annoyance. It's great for when you've got a short bus/train journey or something and want a quick hit of turn-based combat. And you get to see characters from the FF games you never got around to playing, which is neat.

[Ignimortis]

11 and 14 were boring and shallow, but they're MMOs so I don't really count them. 12 was awful. I have no interest in 4 hour long boss fights, and no time for them even if they did interest me.

Can't speak for 11, but 14 is quite good at high-level. The basic combat system gets really good in the 50-60 span, when you get many of your off-GCD abilities to weave into combos.

Though I admit that the first 30 levels are a chore, and the high-level content lately has been disappointingly boring outside of high-end PvE (4.1 through 4.3 specifically, the main quest slowed down and most things that aren't extreme Primals or Savage raids are rather dull). Still, it feels better to me than World of Warcraft ever did. I just hope that Square Enix stop using the "ok this works, so we're doing this and nothing else" content development scheme.

[Hunter Noventa]

Can't speak for 11, but 14 is quite good at high-level. The basic combat system gets really good in the 50-60 span, when you get many of your off-GCD abilities to weave into combos.

Though I admit that the first 30 levels are a chore, and the high-level content lately has been disappointingly boring outside of high-end PvE (4.1 through 4.3 specifically, the main quest slowed down and most things that aren't extreme Primals or Savage raids are rather dull). Still, it feels better to me than World of Warcraft ever did. I just hope that Square Enix stop using the "ok this works, so we're doing this and nothing else" content development scheme.

Hopefully the feedback they've gotten on how terrible Eureka is will help a little bit, but yeah. Also, the first 30 or so levels are basically there to teach people who have never played an MMO before how to play one. It sucks when you're leveling a new class, bu tits there.

[Wookieetank]

As for mashing a single button to win combat, that's sort of missing the point. 99% of FPS games are essentially "won" with a single button, that is sort of ignoring everything else.


At least in FPS games you have to consider cover, movement, and so on. Mashing I'm okay with, I love me some good button mashing, but XV you just had to hold it down. No mashing, just holding it down and the game takes care of the rest. New combat press circle, hold it down, done. Maybe change your weapon if you had too. Now the hunts and bosses you couldn't get away with that, and they were much more interesting for it, but when your main combat option is just holding down one button, its not that interesting. They did a great job of making it look wonderfully flashy, but the interaction part left much to be desired, to the point where I was skipping most combat that wasn't a boss/hunt/required by the end of the game.

Don't get me started on interact and jump being the same button either, just ugh :smallmad:

Re: VIII & menu color:
I will admit that it fit the game and the aesthetics thereof, but it was not a color I personally enjoyed at all.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Actually, I really like FF XIV's early game, although I may be coming from a slightly different perspective.

Right now, I just have a Trial account, because I really don't have disposable income at the moment, so I'm capped at 35. As of now, I have 15 in every combat class, with some higher, plus having dabbled in some of the crafting and resource obtaining classes.

The early game perspective of FF XIV is geared to not be repetitive. Your first class has all the quests you can undertake which naturally guide you from quest hub to quest hub, and let you enjoy an organic and enjoyable experience. At the very beginning you start off in only one of three possible starter cities, based on the initial Job you pick. You can freely swap between jobs that you can access, but not all jobs are going to be in your starter town, and you need to get up to 15 in a class before unlocking the airship system and the other two cities, giving you access to all starter jobs.

One thing I'd like to say that keeps it from being boring and repetitive is that classes are just mechanically different. Like very mechanically different, even at low levels. I mean, let's look at the two arcane DPS classes: Arcanist and Thaumaturge.

Arcanist is a pet class, they get access to a couple of dots and a pretty meh nuke and a choice between an offense pet and a defense pet. You can set the pet to auto, in which they spam their cooldown abilities, or manual, in which you have to command them to use their cooldown abilities. Effective pet control is necessary for getting the most out of the class, and keeping your dots up helps too.

Thaumaturge is the precursor to everybody's favorite glass canon Black Mage (which unlocks at level 30). They do elemental blasting, ice and fire mostly with lightning as a DD/DoT, but that's not it. You get a pair of stances pretty early on, Umbral Ice and Astral Fire, and a skill that lets you swap between them. Astral Fire increases the damage you do at the cost of increasing the mana cost of Fire spells and slowing down your mana recovery. Umbral Ice lets you rapidly regenerate mana, but reduces your damage output. Oh, you get into Astral/Umbral by casting a spell of the appropriate element, if you aren't in one or the other already, and casting cross element (casting a Fire spell in Umbral Ice, for example) simply drops you out of the stance, so you don't want to do that. Oh, and the stance lasts for 13 seconds and is refreshed by casting a spell in that element (so Astral is refreshed by Fire and vice versa), so you pretty much have to keep it up. Swapping into Umbral in combat kind of sucks because until you can swap back, you really feel the hit in DPS.

These two classes offer a totally different mechanical playstyle. You aren't just going near a mob, and spamming your magic in either case, you are having to manage and control things, keep an eye on not just your mana but generally something else as well. It feels fresh, even though it's the same game, and keeps things from getting repetitive, even if you are grinding up a new class.

Hell, even melee classes feel a bit different with the Combo system they have implemented. Granted, not that degree of different, but different enough to enjoy the change in dynamic.

Now, as far as grinding... on the one hand, you can't just grind the same quests, because you've already done them. On the other hand, you don't NEED to grind the same quests, because they have alternate 'catch up' mechanics available to you. First off, you get an xp bonus (and a pretty steep one at that) in a job which is significantly lower than your highest level job, which really helps. Second off, you have other ways of getting bonus XP just out in the world: Hunting rewards, Levees, and FATES.

FATEs are... a mixed bag. Basically a timed quest, generally in an area on the map, that involves either killing a boss or killing a swarm of mooks. Winning at a FATE gives bonus xp and cash, plus it gets rid of the FATE for the moment. They're kind of a grab bag, and can be very annoying if you are trying to accomplish tasks in the area that the FATE is in and can't handle taking on both whatever you were sent out to do and the FATE stuff at the same time. Of course, if you can, that's double plus bonus xp.

Levees are basically a store of fairly simple quests, most of the combat levees are along the lines of 'go here, kill stuffs, maybe have a gimmick you have to do to keep things fresh'. They tend to not be too far from the levee issuer, at least at low levels. You get the Levee, you go to the area, then you initiate it to start the quest. It's kind of like instanced combat, only not in an instance, which means FATE's might screw you over if they overlap (or may simply give you xp faster if you can handle it all). You can jack up the level of the Levee to increase difficulty and reward, there's bonuses for finishing them faster, bonuses for killing 'bounty' mobs which might spawn... it's a pretty good system. You get... I think three per day? But you can store them up to like a hundred or so. Since I only get to play around once a week, I never have a shortage of them, and they're a great way to play catch-up.

Hunting rewards are another really cool mechanic, and someone actually put some thought into it to teach players how to deal with specific types of threats. They ask you to kill 3-5 of some mob, and tell you the zone they are in, but don't tell you where in the zone they are in, which can both be a bit frustrating and a bit interesting as you really get a chance to explore these amazing places. Of course, there's always the Wiki to tell you where they are if you get frustrated. There are ten different hunting challenges for levels 1-10, and ten more for 11-20, and so forth. You could, at least in theory, complete all ten the moment the next tier unlocks, which requires completing the previous tier (if applicable), but practically you'll probably be taking on three or four of them, then doing something else, then going back to it. The xp rewards are pretty good, and makes for an interesting change of scenery.

The last thing that they use that I think really minimizes the grinding time is the Chocobo Porters to run you around to the various quest hubs, where most challenges aren't too far off from. Think of it like the gryphon rider system from early WoW days, if you will. While on your Chocobo, you aren't being engaged by enemies, which means you can get from Point A to Point B without needing to deal with any FATEs that might pop up between, and for a very nominal charge. You can also teleport directly to quest hubs, and can do so from literally anywhere, although it can get quite expensive if you do it frequently. And there's always the equivalent of Hearthstone on a cooldown timer. So even in the very early game, you have transportation options to get back and forth when necessary.

Maybe it is because I'm new to the game, and everything seems fresh and amazing, maybe I'm just a final fantasy fanboi who is squeeing at all the shinies, I dunno. But I happen to think they put in a LOT of effort into making the early game much less of a grind than in, say, Everquest or WoW.

[Hunter Noventa]

Maybe it is because I'm new to the game, and everything seems fresh and amazing, maybe I'm just a final fantasy fanboi who is squeeing at all the shinies, I dunno. But I happen to think they put in a LOT of effort into making the early game much less of a grind than in, say, Everquest or WoW.

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it, it's always nice to hear because it is a good game. And if you think you're squeeing now, wait until you can subscribe and progress the story. There are just so many references to the other FF Games.

[Tetsujin-28]

In the early FFs combat is meant to be simple and quick, because the main challenge is supposed to come from exploring dungeons and figuring out where to go next. As latter FFs toned that aspect down, the boring combat becomes more evident because there's nothing really to challenge the player.

[Ignimortis]

*snip*

Melee classes get a lot better at being different at certain points. As someone who has every class at least at 30...

Tanks:
Gladiator/Paladin gets good very late, maybe at level 60 even. Heavensward gave them all the things they lacked to be fun, and it shows.
Marauder/Warrior gets good at 54. Two words that will change your life: FELL CLEAVE.
Dark Knight gets okay-ish at 45, when you get Dark Arts. Then it stays kind-of-ok until 70, because 75% of its' kit has been nerfed or deleted to make way for The Blackest Night, which is...disappointing a bit, really. It's a good skill, but I wouldn't be surprised if SE actually rolled out a whole new version of DRK in 5.0.

Melee DPS:
Pugilist/Monk is actually pretty fun all along, maybe from level 10 or 15. A bit complex for newcomers, maybe.
Lancer/Dragoon starts off really slow and gets good at level 50, excellent at level 58. Nice if you want to get good at the game but don't feel confident that you can learn everything quickly.
Rogue/Ninja is fine from 45 onwards. Lots of inputs, lots of combos.
Samurai is fine at 50, gets better at 52, gets even better at 62. Very simple, very straightforward melee class for those who don't really want to mess around with complex rotations - just keep your buffs up and store charges for Iaijutsu.

Oh, and by the way - don't judge the story until you're level 50. It gets incredible around the patch 2.4 quests and stays that way at least until patch 3.3 quests are done. It's a wild ride for 10+ levels and I would recommend the game just for those quests alone.

[keepLooking]

Not a huge FF fan yet the combat system XV is fine