ID:43946
 
Keywords: videogames
Growing up, I never really played any of the Final Fantasy games, which is weird, because I was a huge RPG fan. Quite frankly, I don't think I missed much.

Final Fantasy IV (originally released as FF2 here in the US) was okay I guess. The super-linear gameplay, completely forgettable characters and a blah storyline really failed to impress me. The worst part: almost every single character "dies" at one point then ends up coming back to life. This is completely stupid in terms of storytelling, but what it also does is make you completely unattached to your party. Why give a damn about your characters' level and equipment if they could "die" any moment?

I've now played about half of the Final Fantasy games, and I feel confident in saying that it is one of the most overrated series of games of all time. There are just so many better RPGs out there... and from the days of the NES to the present, there have been better RPGs available all along.

Whenever the mood strikes, the next FF game that I'm going to try is FF3. I hear a lot of hype about its "revolutionary" job system, but something tells me that Dragon Warrior 3's class-changing system easily trounces it. We'll see.
Played FFVII? Widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time. Great story, great characters, great gameplay.
Hazman wrote:
Played FFVII? Widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time. Great story, great characters, great gameplay.

Also widely regarded as one of the most over-rated RPGs of all time. No scratch that, it is the most over-rated rpg of all time.
Really? I think it's absolutely fantastic.
Hazman wrote:
Played FFVII? Widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time. Great story, great characters, great gameplay.

I've played it a bit, watched a friend play through most of the major plot points, read up on the story and magic system etc, and determined that I don't much feel like playing through it.

I won't deny FFVII's impact or decry it as overrated without even playing through it... but I will say that it doesn't really appeal to me much.

For me, the epitome of a great RPG is something like Skies of Arcadia and Dragon Warrior 3/4.
Um in my opinion Final Fantasy 4 was okay but I liked Final Fantasy 6 soo much better. Even despite FF7 being my first FF, I can easily say FF6 was the best to me. FF& pretty much took some of the best of 6 and remastered it a bit.

Also, Final Fantasy 3 is so so; it's a bit worse than the other ones. I assume you're gonna play it on the DS.
I'd hate to agree, but I do.

I've played through FF1-8 (forced myself for most of them.) Nothing all that special, I tried picking up FF7 recently to reassess my bias and I couldn't play more than an hour. The only games of the series I could play without wanting to bash my head into the corner of my desk was FF4 and FF6, though even that became a chore.

I'm a huge RPG fan as well, maybe I don't have the same sort of brain functions required to enjoy such a "great" series.
Funny; I posted this same blog entry over at Destructoid and pissed off a legion of fanboys.
I played FFVII on the PS1. I never finished it because the game has a nifty pitfall where, if you don't dispatch a certain number of opponents on a train within a certain time limit, you can still continue playing -- but then, a few hours later, you fail the last boss fight for the 7th time, look it up on the Internet, and find out you never obtained the one item that can kill him.

By the time I realized that, I'd grown to loathe the random combats every 10 seconds and the drawn-out, unskippable magic casting animations during battles. The plot didn't impress me much either -- a giant heap of cliches garnished with half-assed Gaia-worship, though truth be told, I don't require much of a video-game plot except that it exist.

HOWEVER... the music was excellent, and the pre-rendered graphics -- a combination of medieval fantasy, steampunk, and Machine Age design (http://images.google.com/ images?hl=en&q=%22machine%20age%22%20design&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa =N&tab=wi) -- were some of the best I've seen in a video game. I just didn't like the game part of the game.
"Nad Crusher says:
(# 1) on 06/09/2008 17:52
Go back to playing grandtheft auto sandbox fag."

That has to be my favorite reply. It's pretty much another way of saying, "I like to be lad along on a short leash."
Best thing about Final Fantasy: The music.
Random encounters get annoying, fast. FFVII is super-overrated. At the time I suppose it had good graphics and great gameplay, but so did various other games, and they weren't on three discs.
It's kind of a personal preference, in regards to whether you enjoy FFIV or not. Personally, I enjoyed the fact that they weren't afraid to kill off or severely maim characters, because it opens the stage for another character to enter. Not only that, but most of the characters that "die off" still end up playing crucial roles in the story and/or getting a really spiffy spoon, to toss.

The difficulty of the game is almost non-existent unless it's your first RPG; however, the same can be said for DW3 and DW4--both of which I greatly enjoyed.

In any case, the game doesn't rate doesn't rate in my top 5 RPGs, but it's a solid game nonetheless.

I'm curious. Have you played any of the Suikoden games?
Yeah, the original FF was great because of how much it pushed into a little NES cart. Much like DW in that respect. The later FF games were cliche' ridden and waaaay overrated, however. The whole big hair/big sword thing is way overdone. I also preferred the DW series, but it got a bit silly, too. I don't care for the DBZ style animations of the latest versions *at all*. However, the games have been solid. I did like Square's alternate FF games like Final Fantasy Adventure and Legend on GB alot. Also, Secret of Mana was an excellent game.
Jmurph, I hope you're not talking about DW1 being 'pushed' onto that little NES cart, because DW1 barely had any game to it. Which just goes to show that you don't need to have a large game to make a fun game.

I suggest you play through Final Fantasy 6(US3), Silk. The beginning can be a bit linear, but they change it up, and the ending it very, VERY open to the way you approach it(by end I mean the entire second half of the game).

I never played very far into Final Fantasy 3 to know how the story went, but Final Fantasy 5 has a similar job-changing style to it. However, it has a rather linear story to it as well.
Jmurph wrote:
I did like Square's alternate FF games like Final Fantasy Adventure and Legend on GB alot. Also, Secret of Mana was an excellent game.

That's because those "alternate" FF games aren't actually FF games. FF Adventure was a Mana game originally and the Legend series are actually SaGa games.

They just got renamed so they'd actually sell with the FF name.

All I had to do was read the title before I could reach an agreement. Final Fantasy is, by far, the most overrated series of all time.

I liked FFIV, though, same goes for VI and IX. FFX-2 was the point where I hoped everybody would realize how rediculous FF is getting, but about 90% of the gaming world doesn't seem to get it yet.
Golden Sun is the best RPG i have ever played. I just love the series.
Golden Sun is pretty fun, it's not top-tier worthy though.
I've never understood the fan loyalty for FFIV. It's a boring grind of a game.

6 is probably the earliest FF game I played in the series that didn't seem like a chore to play it. Some of the later ones have been pretty stupid, but at least they haven't been terribly bland.

I'd take Dragon Warrior 3/4 over Final Fantasy 4 any day.
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