I've been wanting to do this for a long time. Start at 1, end at 15, hit them all in short order without my usual focus on 100% completion, but rather a start to finish ride to take in all the story lines.

Two conditions:

It has to be available on PC

I really really really don't want to touch those weird-looking chibi remakes of FF2 and FF3. The closer to the originals, the better. I'm not sure that's an option with 2 or 3 except by way of a fan translation. Any alternatives or good resources for that?

Are the updated versions of 5 and 6 worth it or should I just dig up ROMs?

Was FF12 never released on PC? I don't see it for sale on the Square-Enix website, but that's pretty odd given every other title since 7 has been.

Are 11 and 14 capable of being experienced as a standard game with a fairly linear plotline, or are they open world exploration types that you can never really get a feel for without investing 100+ hours?

Any other general advice would be appreciated.

Saw your post so i thought i'd put in my 2 cents.

Lo and behold, the only way to play 12 is on emulator. They never released it for PC (this might change with the remaster however)

Okay, so 1 and 2 are available as Dawn of souls for GBA. So again, emulator (1 and 2 are not available on pc as yet, like 12)

if you mean 2 (4) then yes chibi. and 3 (steam) is chibi also.

5 and 6 are good for the end game, so if you are just doing the story it's no different. In fact you wont notice any difference until after you defeat kefka. (apart from the graphics) Same also for 5. no difference until after you defeat xdeath

as far as 11, there are now 9(?) expansions.. it depends on what you want to do. 11 is really not story driven.. it wasn't when i was playing it. Though you do get cool cutscenes letting you know about the new expansions. Literally when you walk into certain areas. There is a narrative to follow, but you'll always be grinding to get to the next part in the story - it requires you to be at a certain level. This is the same for 14. If you go in for story, just following the main story quests is possible (they are seen by a crown symbol instead of the classic "ARR" looking quest icon, which is like a circle) But you may fall behind in levels to get to the end of the story - especially at low levels.

I would say you can experience 11 and 14 as standard game... i have a fc member doing that. (FC = free company, guilds) 11 and 14 are mmos, so they are huge games, with lots to do, and basically centred around team work - if you want to do the story you have to level a character from 1-50 to finish the story. There's a new expansion coming out, if you really poured into getting to the end of that, yeah easily 100 hours. I haven't done it fast, but i think my clock is at about 100 days playing. (time spent playing the game) However i'd say that the story can be done quickly if you just want to finish the first game. As mentioned before, main story quests are easy to identify

Thanks!

From what I was looking at later, apparently non-chibi updates exist on the PSP. I don't know how easy it is to get emulators for newer systems like that, but I'll look around.

In general, closest to original as possible is my goal. With 4-6 a little graphic boost would help mix things up against since I'm already highly familiar with the games.

If that's the case then go for the steam versions.

PPSSPP is the main psp emulator. I've played crisis core on that... just be sure the game works on it before trying to play. I think the emulation is pretty good but it's always safe to check what games work well on certain emulators.

Also, when you get to 14 let me know! i'm getting ready to get into stormblood. They actually have multi-server parties now. They even let you pass word protect it so only certain people can join it.

Will do! That might be a good year from now, because I'm currently still trying to read all of the Wheel of Time series before I even start this (going to be wrapping up book 8 of 14 soon) and then I intend to start from FF1, but I'll definitely let you know.

Btw, looking on google i found out that others have been complaining about 1 and 2 not being on pc. I don't know how long one of these would take - and they'd probably do the new treatment to it. As far as keeping to the originals, gba versions are kinda close. (no more classic battle screens or general 16 colour sprites)

For ff14, it is a really good story. The storyline takes you through most of the game. Meaning there are optional areas, but you get dungeons, primal fights (ifrit etc) and even fighting with npc characters. You get to fish, gather and mine (i think.. it's quite late though) You join a grand company (there are 3) which you can pursue to get more xp and better equipment... Battle chocobo... (it's optional but you unlock the quest for it as long as you sign up for the company) There's also some optional quest lines which are cool to the story too. Like gilgamesh and other characters. Yeah, and battles do get harder as you play through the story. So there's some very rewarding parts to it. I tried to be silent on the details. Hope that helps.

Well one aspect of this just got easier.

I found a Gameboy Advance in my closet with a copy of Final Fantasy I & II sticking in it. An hour digging around yielded a charger to match it.

I guess I could be posting here instead of hijacking a random other thread.

Finished FF5 last night. I remember it being fairly dull compared to 4 and 6 as a kid, and I think that still holds. Exdeath is a very bland enemy. There's a heavy dose of forced tragedy with the NPCs--the NES cliche of "so-and-so just showed up at a critical game moment after having no plot relevance for the last five hours so this scene will be exactly them dying to aid the main party"--is alive and well. The music is certainly solid, but not consistantly on par with its immediate predecessor.

What I did like a lot, and didn't pick up on quite as much as a kid, was the sort of tenderness of the main cast. Unlike 4, where your party is changing constantly, we're back to the classic four players chosen by fate at the start of the game to be your champions without much variance. But here an effort was made to show them stepping up into their role. The original partnership is viable; there's a good reason for them to all wind up together besides being the "chosen ones". While Butz eventually falls prey to the "destiny" cheese in his backstory, he mostly just functions as an average Joe who got caught up by chance in a quest to save the world. I think that approach is a lot more compelling, and they develop it in him.

There's a lot of formality going on in FF4 (especially in the original English translation I chose to roll with), and there's strong support for it. The characters had an established professional relationship going into the game, and they were nobles more inclined to express themselves at some distance. It worked, for 4. In 5, Square does a good job of selling the cast as a more casual band of soldiers. There are endless scenes of them just having fun together and growing progressively more comfortable with each other as they transition from strangers to seasoned veterans. Butz isn't some icon of the ideal warrior. He's just a dude. Enjoys throwing a few back after a long day's journey; gawks at women all the time in a way you might expect from a country bumpkin (as opposed to say, Edge in FF4); playfully picks on his partners when they make mistakes; is kind of a dick to animals (maybe not the most directly endearing quality, but it certainly helped give him a distinct flavor that fit his broader mold). Family matters; the characters have functional relationships with their family, and as tragedy strikes the game develops a more authentic sense of grief in them. Sometimes they just act in impulsive rage at what's happening around them. It's a far cry from the stone-cold determination to rise to all adversity that you see earlier in the franchise. It progresses. By the last few deaths, they aren't even trying to pull themselves together. You can feel their morale tanking more and more as things go on; they aren't "rising to the challenge", they're just pressing on because they have no other option. Square never tries to cheese a romantic engagement out of Butz either, despite that he's surrounded by women. He's too dejected and pissed off by the tragedy engulfing him to think of his partners as anything but friends. Once again a sharp contrast to FF4, where the cast felt more like hardened fighters accustom to death coming into it and could get over the hump relatively quickly.

I dunno, I'm not going to say the character development was better than FF4's. It's more like 4 took an old trope where characters weren't even important enough to have names and infused them with personality, whereas here they're trying something brand new for the series: all back stories aside, they made the characters normal people.

I don't mean to oversell it; they could have done a lot more. But relative to the previous games in the series, I felt the character development here was convincing and took a novel approach.

One point that's... not really a good or bad thing, but just something I noticed, is how much easier the game felt. Granted I did a lot of mindless grinding to get my skill points up, I don't think I ever felt challenged at any point outside of the non-mandatory boss fights, many of which were so intense that I didn't even bother (Shinryuu opened its fight hitting me for more than my max HP at level 61 with all skills maxed and 30% HP boost activated). I guess I could grind for hours to get my level high enough to beat him if I really wanted to win the best weapon in the game, but at that point I'd be 1-shotting the final boss even without it, so what's the point really?) I played FF4 easy (US SNES) type for translation purposes, and I still ran into a lot of bosses against which I had to actually take some caution and think about my choices. By the end of 5, I was using exactly X-Attack and Cure 3 as the entirety of my rotation--the former consistently hit for the equivalent of 9999 damage, and the latter every other turn was enough to outheal every boss in the game. Obviously you don't get there witout maxing out a lot of skill classes in the first place, but the end reward for doing so felt pretty underwhelming in so far as it left almost every class nonviable, perhaps even more so than in FF3. That being said, if the franchise hadn't accustomed me to needing to power level to progress, I might have just enjoyed a fun play without the compulsion to seek extra encounters along the way and enjoyed a casual challenge. Having that option is a good thing. I miraculously still had my end game save from like 1998 when I loaded this up, and in that playthrough I was a whopping 20 levels lower at the final boss, 41 vs 61.

Starting 6 tonight probably. This series playthrough is going really fast so far, though that's going to take a hit once I get to 7 and can't fast forward through random encounters anymore.

---------- Post added at 12:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 AM ----------

Quick take rankings so far, from best to worst:

1. Final Fantasy IV: huge turning point in the series for depth of play; phenomenal soundtrack; breaks away from the all-encompassing black and white good vs evil pitch to give characters points of internal conflict; enemy battle sprites are infused with Yoshitaka Amano's twisted and bizarre style to feel really creepy in spite of early SNES graphics; first game to attempt actual character development, with lots of compelling twists as characters you begin to bond with suddenly keel over

2. Final Fantasy V: reverts to a more cliche approach from the start compared to 4. Heroes and villains are defined immediately and never waver. Some death events are just happening for the sake of maintaining an established "kill everyone non-essential" cliche approach to tragedy. A general feeling that the game was a bit of a rush job. Good character development in the main cast though, presents the heroes in a more casual light. Ample cut scenes project the cast as a band of relatively normal people experiencing joy and sorrow as opposed to battle-hardened veterans. Establishes an intimate bond between them that doesn't feel cliche. Job system is diversified and less tedious than previous installments that used it, although by the end most classes are overwhelmingly inferior to the best options.

3. Final Fantasy III: Fun prototype to the series. First game to really immerse you in the flavor of the franchise and not just feel like a generic RPG. Not sure how much I enjoyed it independently, but it was fun seeing so many elements of the future franchise find their footing for the first time. By far my favorite of the NES titles. Still completely devoid of character development (the cast don't even have names), but the environment is unique and the mechanics, music, and art come together to really feel like Final Fantasy for the first time in hindsight.

4. Final Fantasy I: Nothing I couldn't have thrown together in RPG Maker. Really just a mechanical procedure of fighting mobs and piecing together some really obscure hints to figure out where you're supposed to go next. Competitive with other RPGs of its day, but doesn't stand the test of time. Boring, really.

5. Final Fantasy II: This game was bad. No getting around it. The skill raising system is god-awful and requires endless mindless grinding with no room for enjoyment. First attempt to create a plot (yes the characters actually have names) falls off a cliff. Like, Leon goes from being your unskilled childhood friend to the supreme evil leader of Team Evil over night with no freaking plot justification and then rejoins you as the prodigal son presumably only because his quest for world domination didn't quite pan out. Attempts at character development are so superficial that the simple fact that they have names is their most meaningful identifying features. Yet I do remember the story better than FF3's; it did at least attempt to have one. Unfortunately it wasn't nearly enough, and almost all other features of the game were bad.

Kind of unreal how much better FF6 turned out to be than any game in the series before it. That's not to say the older games were weak, but so much more went into crafting 6. It's on a completely different level, and they accomplished that without a system upgrade.

Beat FF7 today. Hot take:

First of all, I was shocked by how little I remembered of this game. I had to check my notes (yes I started keeping logs of this crap when I was like 8), and I'd only ever beaten FF7 twice as a kid, compared to say, 7 runs of FF6, Chrono Trigger, and Suikoden. Many aspects of it were very much a novel experience for me.

My eyes adjusted to the poor quality of the CG, but I never got completely used to all of the characters being boxes. Compared to FF6 maxing out the SNES's potential, it was just a little rough. That certainly wasn't a game ender though.

As a kid, I loved the Shinra. They had so many characters, and it was really their collapse from power that I took as the focal plot of the game. I think my imagination imbued them with a lot more personality than they actually had. As an adult, I found them a lot more 1-dimentional. The Turks are still cool guys just doing their jobs, but Heidegger, Scarlet, Palmer, they were all essentially chaotic evil types. Rufus was evil. Hojo was evil. Tseng was evil. Reeve is really the only normal guy with human emotions, and he spends most of the game in the avatar of a freaking stuffed animal. No, the Shinra weren't half as fun as I remembered. They were pretty shallow. A lot of that enemy-of-my-enemy empathy I thought I remembered never really blossoms. They're too busy going GYAHAHAHA when buildings topple over. It's a wonder they even bothered to fight the Weapons; I think most of them would have enjoyed watching Junon and Midgar burn. At least a lot of the nameless every day soldiers and employees you encounter had a human side.

On the other hand, the more integral theme of the fight to save the planet made more sense to me. It was also kind of shallow and vague (ok so there's this thing that exists that is Jenova that destroys planets but the planet has a big white ball of stuff and some monsters that will fight it and if a Cetra prays to it it will turn green and Jenova's meteor can only be stopped by green glowing things not white ones), but as a kid I just remember going huh? and ignoring it. Um... I don't know if that's a good thing, it's just a thing.

I did appreciate the playable characters a lot more than I used to. I ended up rolling with Barret and Tifa all game just like I used to, but I wanted to put Cid in my party too. I wanted to put Red XIII in my party. I felt like they all had well developed personalities except Vincent, and all but him and Yuffie had a clear reason to fight by my side. (Interestingly enough, Vincent and Yuffie were my least favorite characters as a kid too.) I think Barret and Cid especially shined to me in a way I wasn't able to appreciate when I was younger. Like Barret was always the tough guy, but it never sunk in before that the dude's a freaking terrorist. He's killed thousands of innocent civilians for his political cause. He's really not a "good guy" in the classic sense. He's uneducated and radicalized, and Tifa and Cloud aren't much better. Cid and Red are more the brains of the operation, and Cid's got his own agenda that only gradually comes in line with the interests of the planet. Not the pure, selfless heroes we're used to at all. I really liked that.

The scene where a Weapon attacks Junon was freaking epic.

The materia system was kind of fun in itself, but made the game comically easy. I made almost no effort to power up my characters (didn't even bother with the whole chocobo breeding crap to get Knights of the Round and some of the top tier materia) and bosses were still barely scratching me. About the only times I stopped to think about what actions I needed to take were learning the Midgar Zolom's enemy skill early and in the final dungeon when I ended up sticking myself with nothing but Cloud and an underleveled Vincent to fight off enemies that used instant death crap after I hadn't been able to save my game for two hours. (I assumed the party split would require me to actually play each of them, so I sent off the characters that were actually prepared for it into different groups.) Basic physical attacks took out just about any average monster. Bosses were quickly shut down with limit breaks and summons. I beat Sephiroth while I thought the fight was still just warming up. Dude just kind of rolls over and dies as long as you use a megalixir after his ultimate ability.

On the whole though, I really did like it, and it was tastefully brief (my timer was somewhere between 35 and 40 hours). It's hard to even relate it to the other games. Definitely not as good as 6. Did I like it as much as 4? They're so radically different. Classic high fantasy vs steampunk fantasy. The latter naturally appeals to me more, and I want to say yeah I enjoyed this more than 4, with a caveat that 4 had significantly better music and that factor is pretty relevant to my overall enjoyment.

So where am I at in rankings now, eh?

Something like
6
7
4
3
5
1
2

And now it's time for the real test. I've been looking forward to this a lot. As a teenager I hated FF8. I thought it was really emo and sappy and I just couldn't enjoy anything about it outside of the card game. I know it's a lot of people's favorite game in the series. I remember approximately nothing whatsoever about it besides that random encounters level with you (hated that at the time but might like it now) and that Squall says "..." and cries a lot. Will I walk away from this with a radically different opinion, or will I feel about the same now as I did then? I'll start to find out in a few days.

This intrigued me enough that I'm going to pick back up FF7 after I finish replaying Front Mission: Gun Hazard.

Weird news

I'm about 3 hours into FF8, and so far

I really like it :o

I remember Balamb Garden being interminable. Might have been my teenage insistence on drawing everything to 100, though.

That's actually the part I'm enjoying haha

Have to actually worry about bosses killing me when I can't start fighting them until 15 minutes into the engagement. That's kind of novel given the last few games.

---------- Post added at 10:10 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 AM ----------

That being said, I had my first two minute encounter with Rinoa and instantly despised her, so that's not a good look for the future.

---------- Post added at 10:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:10 AM ----------

So far Squall has been more of a stone cold mercenary than the annoying emo crybaby I remembered, but falling madly in love with a bimbo probably won't help maintain that image.

yer so analytical

sometimes ya gotta let art just wash over you

Seriously, though, FF8 is kind of a "Well, we can't top FF7 so let's double down on making teenage hormone levels go through the roof, I dunno, we're getting close to our Logan's Run-inspired retirement ages here" to me

That being said, it does have some of the most killer music and best overall 'world feel.' You know, no chibi tiny people.

Ok I finished FF8 uh

The junctioning/leveling/powering up system was great and by far the most fun for me in the series so far. I immediately wanted to start the game over again and see how it performs if you intentionally avoid all experience points. (But I don't have time, so I won't.)

I thought Squall was a very well developed character and I actually liked him a lot. That was probably the biggest difference from my childhood memories of the game.

The music's solid on the whole. I wouldn't say that it grew on me further, in large part because there were a lot of bewildering track selections for particular scenes that clashed heavily with the mood. (Even Liberi Fatali felt very displaced from the video it plays over.)

Almost all of the other characters were horrible. It had the worst plot of any plot-focused game I have ever played. The methods employed for storytelling were often very wonky and left me clueless as to what I was supposed to do next without checking a guide. The world felt extremely empty, clashing hard with the modern settings of most of the towns you visit. (At least on PC) party changes were pretty glitchy and frequently resulted in all of my GFs being removed. When an equipped NPC left the party my magic would randomly redistribute itself between all six characters, and I'd have to resort it manually. Limitations to controller customization made piloting the garden or ragnarok a bit of a pain in the ass.

Really though, the black abyss of a plot made all of the smaller faults feel more severe than they should have. Every piece was tethered on with an arbitrary thread of nonsense and no regard for whether it generated a coherent story. Even if you accept the frequented "if you wish upon a star your dreams come true" excuse to resolve impossibly lost causes, the game leaves you with endless logical absurdities if taken at face value. Was Cid Kramer completely chill with learning that his wife is a mass murderer because he is a closet sadist? Did Irvine pretend he didn't know any of his childhood friends because he wanted to exploit Selfie's memory loss to get into her pants? Of course the answer is just they didn't even bother to try to make this stuff make any sense.

A friend of mine who calls FF8 his favorite in the series offered a unique interpretation of it that resonated really well with me, though I would be surprised and impressed if it was the developers' actual intent. He felt most of the characters and broader story could be safely ignored as an ambiguous artistic backdrop to the main plot, which was Squall's transformation into Seifer by way of the antagonist Rinoa. At the start of the game, he's the level headed leader making all of the right decisions and staying focused while his coworkers are acting impulsively and screwing it all up. All game long they show him no respect and treat him like he's got some kind of disease. Rinoa enters the scene by making a move on Squall which feels a little less innocent when you learn later on that she was dating Seifer at the time. She gets herself into a position where Seifer has to come to her rescue, and for a time she believes that it got him killed, but that doesn't make her hesitate to start pulling the same moves on Squall. She gets a thrill out of manipulating strong men to jeopardize themselves trying to save her. Throughout the game she is constantly showing up where she shouldn't be when plans seem to be running smoothly and forcing Squall to abandon his mission to come rescue her. She's always manipulating him. He never gives her his ring; she steals it and then convinces him that he wanted her to have it anyway. He never agrees to go to the party in FH; she lies about it and then gaslights him like he'd asked her out on a date or something. She's never really seen trying to befriend him, just constantly flirting. It's a game to her, and she ultimately ends up winning. He falls for her and repeatedly jeopardizes the world at her behest, and by the end of the game he swears to be her knight and protect her even if she becomes an evil sorceress, just as Seifer did with Edea. The game is about Squall's descent from a strong independent leader to Rinoa's broken puppet.

I rather doubt the game was intended to be perceived that way, but if I look at it from that angle it certainly feels a lot more compelling than if I take the game at face value. And there are some interesting unresolved hints that give a dark interpretation some credence. I never understood why you had to name the ring Rinoa stole from Squall, but it was Griever, the same name as Ultimecia's slave GF in the final battle. Coincidence? There's also an odd cyclical component to it that certainly doesn't make any logical sense but doesn't necessarily need to. We learn in the closing scene that Edea absorbed Ultimecia's consciousness as a direct consequence of Squall and co defeating Ultimecia. The end of the story is essentially the catalyst for the beginning of the story. That evil spirit is ultimately passed on to Rinoa. Are the Ultimecia and Griever that you fight in the final battle supposed actually be Rinoa and Squall thousands of years removed from where the game ends?

This was an interesting read. (http://squallsdead.com/) Apparently Square confirmed that it was not their intention but some people involved liked it enough that they said they would consider alluding to that possibility more if they remade the game.

For all that FF8's plot is bad, I have had a great deal of fun talking about and reading other people's interpretations of it. My default approach to life is if it feels shallow and half-assed Occam's Razor says I'm not missing something and it's just not a very good story. But that doesn't prevent us from playing the game of asking what if this all somehow makes sense.

In that regard (and coupled with the truly innovative leveling system) I definitely enjoyed my play through FF8. You might say I enjoyed it for the wrong reasons, but as a medium of entertainment a fun experience is a fun experience.

I think my 2018 hot take so far is something like:

6
7
4
8
3
5
1
2

A friend of mine who calls FF8 [...] descent from a strong independent leader to Rinoa's broken puppet.

Edited for brevity's sake.

This makes it sound like a parody of FF4, which has a very "Red Cross Knight," "Lancelot/Guinnivere" Romantic Swashbuckler Saving The Damsel In Distress angle.

My interpreting, based on all you just wrote, is that they basically had to try so hard not to repeat story beats from FF7 that the plot became totally incoherent and was unsalvagable by the time production began. But hey, them action figures sure sold well.

This is probably the point at which the team that began the series started getting utterly disgusted with it, if I were to hazard a guess.

I mean FF4 was a lot more classic and didn't need to try to avoid stereotypes; it was openly embracing them. The interpretation above is a lot more creative than that, and realistic too in isolation from the rest of the game. I just think that's more likely my friend's fancy than the developers' intent.

FF8 takes fate/destiny to the point of parody with all of the cast growing up together and just magically coincidentally ending up fighting together without a plot-relevant reason to unite them. A ton of progressions in the game came out of nowhere. Like maybe there were some out of the way NPCs I didn't talk to in Eshar, but I recall being told to go to x location to meet with Ellone. I expected to find her sitting in a house somewhere and all of a sudden my party loads a space ship and launches off to the moon like this was totally normal and expected. Cid cannot generate an emotional reaction to finding out that his wife is an evil witch killing thousands of people, to finding out that I killed the owner of his school who just happened to be a giant mutant blob, etc. Rinoa literally stops breathing for a very long time and they dodge the inevitable death by allowing Squall to magically will fresh oxygen into her tank. Squall takes a day to recover from a superficial wound on his face but brushes off a six inch wide projectile blasting through his chest and out the other side like it's nothing. The game was junk on the surface and there's really no disputing that.

It's still an entertaining thought experiment to try to come up with some sort of coherent explanation for it all.


yer so analytical

sometimes ya gotta let art just wash over you

That's how I approach pretty much everything initially. Still have to word a bit if I want to discuss it afterwards. :P

Oh yes, I totally agree, plot coherence was def in the backseat for 8.

It's a quote from some film. sorry. I am sort of half-conscious at any given moment, lol.

I picked FF9 back up last weekend (I'd left off really early, when you first reach Dali), and it's quickly shaping into prooooooobably my third favorite game in the franchise after 6 and 7.

That being said

I just woke up from this Garland guy obliterating Alexander and how in any world ever did my entire team happen to survive that lol

Also, fun note, I was thinking last night "how would I rank the first 8 games now that I'm a year displaced from them?", and the list I came up with turned out to be the exact same thing I posted in this thread except with 3 flipped above 8, and that was the positioning I was most unsure of.

FFIX actually is a rather decent entry. Actually has the largest soundtrack (quantity-wise with regards to the tracks) of the whole series. So, that's a feat. It definitely feels the most "fantasy"-ish, apart from maybe III.

I doubt I have much of merit to contribute to this thread, as long as it's been here, but I'll have a go at it.

The first two can be played on a ROM as Final Fantasy Origins, or there's the Dawn of Souls port for the Gameboy Advance. The re-releases on PSP are just better special effects and clouds. No change in gameplay. III can be played on your phone, and although I know I'll never beat it as long as I live because I don't have the time, it's a decent challenge. You can get it on Steam too, though. I can't speak for the quality of that version though.

As far as IV, you'll only find the fugly chibi remake on Steam. Which is odd, considering it's been rereleased over 9000 times. Anyway.

I'm just rehashing information that's already been given. But a couple years later, little has changed as far as the availability. XI is basically World of Warcraft and XIV is little more than a clone with slightly superior graphics. Neither feels like it belongs as a numbered title; both could just be Final Fantasy Online, or some such. XII, as far as I know, has only ever been re-released on the PS4, but not PC. The PS4 version is the only version I've ever really played at any length, and while it is a vast setting, it's the closest to an online RPG without actually being one. Still an all right experience, just be ready for a much longer experience than the usual fare.

tl;dr version: 1 and 2 require roms, 3 is on Steam, 4 is on Steam as the chibi remake, 5 needs a rom, 6 needs a rom, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are everywhere, skip 11, 12 requires a rom if you can find one, 13 is on Steam, 14 is balls, and 15 is everywhere.

Hopefully I said something that was helpful. Everyone above has this covered a lot better than I could. I found this thread wicked late, but felt the desire to contribute. I hope you enjoy XII when you get to it; it may not be on VI or VII's level as far as story goes, but it's actually a thrilling time if you're ready for upwards of 30+ hours just for the main story.

I really don't want to skip 11 if I can help it. It's not only a part of the play-through experience from a historical perspective whether it deserves to be or not, but it also marks the point where I ditched the franchise in the first place. I'd really like to experience that continuity. I just hope I can get a decent experience of it in 30-40 hours and not have to roll through it in MMO time. (I don't play WoW anymore, but my /played counter in it by the time I quit could make you vomit.)

---------- Post added at 10:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:02 PM ----------

On that note, I regret not playing FF1 and 2 in their original format via ROM, and I might yet do that at the end of this journey, especially considering both can be easily completed in a weekend. The GBA remakes were quite decent as remakes go, but in the absence of the classic experience they were just two justifiably really boring games. (Well, 2 might have been awful in its own right.) The enjoyment gap for me between 1 & 2 and then 3 was vast, and I want to know how much of that was 3 being so much better vs the fact that I experienced it in its proper NES setting.

Since posting I've noticed some whispers on the interwebs regarding a mobile 'reboot' of Final Fantasy XI being in the works. Not sure if we're talking port or actual 'reboot', but it looks entirely the same. If they call that a reboot, what the hell is XIV then? Anyway. I realise it's a fondly recalled title with many still playing, I just never bothered with it until years later. As near as I can tell, it functions as a standard 30+ hour campaign with a surplus of side content, but the unfortunate side effect of a bunch of 12-year-olds waiting to tea-bag (t-bag?) your KO'd avatar. I myself certainly killed enough hours in WoW to jade myself years back. You ought to be able to play through with little issues, considering the timespan since its initial release and less crowding to impede your experience. For all I know, it may have grown on me with time; I just know my blood pressure and I weren't keen back then on trying to get a game of that size to run, and not totally crash, my Windows XP with dialup.

The first two are definitely not going to make top-100 lists for millennials, and even I found them a bit dull way back when. You really need a youthful imagination with those early titles, because the graphics and storytelling only goes so far. Nothing like that would sell nowadays if it was new. FFII itself should be labeled a defective product with how broken it is. It's to your benefit, but maxing out your stats right out of the shoot is not challenging gameplay. To its benefit, however, you can't deny the raw simplicity of its plot. Orphans who lost everything to an evil emperor and embark on a journey to stop him. YAWN. This sounds awfully familiar. But it doesn't stop there; your group makes it their new mission in life to take this psycho down, and even after he's been vanquished, you're still not done. Now it's time to go to Hell itself and kill him again. No real complications, no plot twists (that aren't neon-sign-obvious), no bollocks; just you, and your quest to take down Emperor Palpating, or whatever his name is. If they remade the game on a graphics engine and gameplay more akin to Conan Exiles, not gonna lie, I'd be all over that.

The originals are a hell of a timepiece, showing off what was, at the time, the best in class. ROMs should have you covered if you're looking for the original, untainted iterations. Everything up until XIII ought to be readily available, but I could be wrong; I'm not familiar with the availability of PS3+ era ROMs. When I game it's almost exclusively PC or PS4, so I know from experience how irritating the lack of accessibility of various titles is.

FF2 is actually Star Wars.

Conveniently, I always hated Star Wars.

(Also FF9 replay is officially in the books now.)

Wow the intro scene to FFX is whack. What did I just watch? I have zero memories of the plot of this game beyond that I thought the gameplay was really fun but teenage-me was too hung up on Tidus being a huge dork and (probably) a lack of a spoon-fed plot, if the intro is any indication, to really enjoy the story component. The voice acting is indeed horrible and that's evident out the gate, but that intro was awesome. I'm kind of excited, because I do have a lot of positive feelings associated with this game. I remember disliking both 8 and 10 on the whole, but I loathed 8. 10 simply failed to live up to my potentially highly unrealistic expectations. On replay of 8, I did find some enjoyable aspects, but I had to struggle and sort of sell myself on them. I have high hopes that the ride through 10 will be a lot more immediately positive. I wouldn't even say I'm "cautiously optimistic" here; I think I'm going to enjoy this game a lot. We'll see how that pans out over the next few weeks. I'm probably going to have to set it aside until next weekend after what I can get through now.

Also, FF9 closed out as super meh as I remembered, but I don't think that's a huge blemish on the game as a whole. It finished weak but it was still a great game. They screwed up one thing in the ending cut scenes though; everyone else has clearly aged a few years, but Eiko is still six!

Eiko clearly has dwarfism. I don't think I ever actually completed IX, because the plot just sort of forgot to happen at around disc 3. It's a pretty decent title, worth a replay if I get a spare minute, but I eventually just couldn't be arsed to dungeon-crawl the fourth or fifth plotless locale. I liked the game better before I had the airship, which is strange to say.

XII has a similar problem; roundabout halfway through, the so-called "lead" character is relegated as an extra and the soldier and the princess take center stage (don't recall either one's name). Good characters, but the pacing of the plot just starts spinning tires in the mud while you're dungeon-crawling one place after the next, each one feeling like a last-minute decision by the developers with little forethought.

IV does this too. Little bit faster pacing, and I do like the story, but it drags around halfway through. I'd be perfectly satisfied if they'd just cut some content if it kept the pacing more consistent, even if it meant a shorter game.

X, though it was hugely hyped, was a letdown for me as far as the voice-acting goes. Also tell me; what is the point in an option to rename your character in a voice-acted game? Just so that everyone else in the story can dance around ever having to address him by name? Aside from adding a high degree of unnecessary challenge for the writers, I found it entirely moot. In FFI, and even FFIII, it made a bit more sense; the characters are less personalities and more just avatars meant to inject you more into the experience yourself, so naming them helps personalise them, considering their skills and roles are then in your hands as well. But Tidus? Just let these people speak his name, for Christsake. X was a pretty ambitious game for its time, and packed some crazy tough boss fights, especially in the second half. I remember Yunalesca making me almost throw in the towel. That big scary ass Medusa head was top, I liked the design, but it grew maddening with each game over screen. No matter how big a letdown X may have been, at least remember it begins with the insane ruin of an entire city. Its sequel? Begins with a J-pop concert. Umwat

VIII simply needs a remake. That game did not age well. I cannot be arsed to sit through those long fadeouts every single time I leave the screen. The big "plot twist" was the most contrived bollocks I've ever seen, too. I don't understand so many people's fanboyism for Squall, either. Seventeen years old? GTFO of here. Nobody's that jaded at seventeen. Not a mote of youthful ambition to be found in his whole body. I know fortysomethings with years of hardship under their belt who could teach this little puff a lesson in how not to be the most depressing group leader of all time. The whole cast is about as likeable as Jersey Shore's. A teen girl named "Selphie"? Should have done one over and named Zell "Roidreige", Seifer "Alfameile", Squall "Eimough", etc. Laguna was fair, though; I actually looked forward to his segments. He didn't make me roll my eyes or facepalm nearly as much. I blame some of it on translation issues, but that can't always be an excuse. I don't know; suppose it's dependent on the player, but I just can't relate too well to these angsty dingbats.

I found a few hours to pick FFX back up and did the cloister of trials thing where you meet Yuna and co. I think it's hilarious how it just faded to a scene with Tidus talking to himself saying "After that night, everything changed", as if we aren't only 24 hours removed from a giant water monster destroying your city and teleporting you 1000 years into the future.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found their younger and present selves have different takes on the games. I played VII not too long after it came out and I loved it then, but when I replayed it(and VIII) around...3 or 4 years ago I think, I found VII extremely disappointing. Didn't find any reason to care about any of the characters, good or bad. I loved how they all looked so cute as legos, but other than that, VIII was the better of the two for me, even with its issues. That theory of Rinoa really being the troublemaker behind of all of it reminds me of how I felt a case could be made that Tifa was really the villain of VII, since she knows the truth about Cloud but never does anything about it until long after Sephiroth gets the black materia and kills Aerith.

As for X, I had the same confusion when I started playing it for the first time, I was like WTF is it? What's going on? It quickly blossomed into my favorite game of the entire franchise. I never had a problem with the voice acting either, maybe because I hadn't played any of the FF games in so long when I first played it maybe like 8 years ago, and the opening threw me so much I was actually paying full attention to the story to figure out what was happening. Of course I'll freely admit that it's things that reminds me of Xena(Braska's pilgrimage taking place TEN YEARS AGO prior to Yuna's pilgrimage), Firefly/Serenity(when Home gets blown up and you're fleeing in the airship, that reminds me of escaping the Reavers in the beginning, and when Rikku uses a flash bomb to escape the wedding), and Futurama.

How do you do the solid black lines for spoilers?

It quickly blossomed into my favorite game of the entire franchise.

I still have quite a ways to go--just played through the Sin attack in Luca after the Blitzball tournament--but I can see this happening. FFs 4, 6, and 7 were somewhat "spoiled" in so far as I played them too much as kids to ever forget them, and I think that inevitably detracted from their replay value, but for better or worse I am enjoying FFX the most of any game in the franchise up to this point.

it's spoiler and /spoiler in brackets

Okay thanks. And I should clarify, of all the FF games I've played, X is my favorite. I've played 1-8, X, X-2, and XII. Haven't played 9 or 11, or any other installments since XII, because that pretty much ruined the entire franchise for me, but that was just me. Replay value for X hasn't stopped yet, I'm doing a run of challenges now. Just finished Tidus only, now I'm on Kimahri only. Next is Tidus/Yuna OSG challenge. Oh and after X, I'd have to say III is my favorite. The original III with the Onion Kids. I also enjoyed Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for its simplicity when I don't feel like playing anything serious.

A shameless advertisement since I seem to have a few followers in this thread: I am presently hosting FFShrine's 6th annual Final Fantasy music knockout tournament (Thread 232836).

I think my only real complaint about FFX so far is that the enemies have a habit of awkwardly delaying their attacks to give you an opportunity to use save spheres. I kind of wish it would just activate the opportunity to save and then force you into combat sometimes, because it really detracts from the immersion to be on the brink of a powerful enemy about to whoop you or guards about to take you prisoner and then just have free reign to roam around and take your time.

That being said, I think I'm in the back third of the game at this point and feel pretty strongly that it's my favorite title in the franchise on replay, so cheers to that.

There are certain parts where if I get too far from the save sphere I'm hurting, and that's when just as I'm about to be able to touch it and recharge my characters, fiends attack. But I also love how games build up a story where you have to fight the Big Bad NOW or the world will be destroyed, but they give you side quests and such where you can take a week or two off without affecting anything. Too bad we can't do that in real life, just basically hit a pause button on whatever is bothering you and just sit back and party for a while :)

The site was down when I completed it, and I'm afraid my most immediate feelings about the end of FFX have faded, but I can safely say this was my favorite game in the series by a substantial margin.

If you like to have LOTS OF THINGS to do, I suggest you play from FF 6 until FF 12 (can't say anything about 11 though). Sidequests aplenty and most of them worthy.

uh

Hoping your run-through of the games is going well. You still on XI? Are you going to play X-2? I'm still waiting for an apology from SE for that...I know alot of people like it, but I'm not one of them.

Just do as I do and pretend X-2 never happened.

Oh yeah, I completed my FFX2 experience while the site was down.

It lasted about 15 minutes.

Yikes.

The only thing X-2 had going for it was that it inspired me for writing some really 'special' fanfics. Fitting since X-2 itself seems like a bad fanfic.

11 is proving equally unplayable but for very different reasons. :\

Aww that sucks. It's one of the FFs I hardly ever hear about, been curious if I should try it myself.

Well once I got over a brutal quest hump it started to get interesting again.

The problem is if you want to progress through your faction's story--which is the practical thing to do, I think, if you're trying to experience it as Final Fantasy game and not just a historically significant MMO--you very quickly face some tasks that were grueling by design and have taken on all new layers of difficulty due to the evolving nature of the game. I had to farm four items with a < 5% drop rate each for something like the third quest in the game, and because they're auctionable and most new characters are created by established players with resources, you have to compete with a bunch of bot farmers who are 1-shotting all the mobs and selling the drops at a level way above your means. Couple that with the spawn rates being low because they were originally designed to be killed by parties of multiple players and now the game is a solo experience with NPCs, and I spent probably 4-5 hours just standing in a room waiting for an ogre to respawn and then diving onto my keyboard in a panic to tag it before a level 99 bot 1-shots it.

Since then it's been back to relatively normal quests, where normal still basically consists of walking down the same path for 10 minutes and then farming some random mob.

I finally got to a quest that sent me outside of the starting city into the other kingdoms, and I quickly discovered that you have to acquire maps for those zones. They aren't given to you out the gate. It translated for me into a lot of aimless wandering with frequent immersion-jarring tab-outs to check online guides.

I guess "aimless wandering" sums up where I'm at so far in a nutshell, and that makes a lot of sense. I mean, what was intended to give it purpose was the fact that you do it with a group of friends, and 15+ years removed it's very much a solo experience now.

So it's kind of like Everquest where you're required to be online to play it?

I mean, I have no direct experience playing Everquest, but it's still an MMO and you have to be online to play it. NPC parties were introduced because the player base was no longer large enough to sustain actual groups of humans progressing through early game content.

Okay, not gonna bother with it then. Are you on XII now then?

Always keen to hear what ff you're playing :)

FFXI is plugging along. I'm at level 40 now. It's a grind on par with the NES titles, the controls are wonky, the combat is almost all autopilot. But there's something quaint about it. You spend so much time just getting from here to there that the landscape becomes very intimate. Oh, it's gone through major contraction much like WoW, but it takes a long time as a new player to get off the ground enough to be able to use things like instant teleportation. (And I still have nothing like a mount.)

It's not a game you play for the story, but it has its charms. I'm in no hurry to be done with it.

I just finished FF XII yesterday. It was much better than I remembered but felt a little rushed at the end. The updated graphics on the switch were very nice and the soundtrack is one of my favourites.

FF12 has probably my favorite soundtrack in the series, and I've never even played the game yet. Looking forward to that. Might be a few months yet before I get there though.

As long as you're having fun, that's what counts!

Today my journeys in Vana'diel came to an abrupt and final end. Upon encountering the level 50 cap Limit Break mechanic, I hit an impasse. Unlocking Limit Breaks felt slightly less enjoyable than watching paint dry. You literally have to grind countless mobs that yield zero experience points for three rare drops in order to turn exp gain back on, and you have to repeat this every five levels. Doing anything other than unlocking Limit Breaks lost its long-term meaning, because you are flushing countless experience points down the drain by choosing to progress the story without pausing to earn Limit Breaks first. I was left with two choices: invest an extraordinary amount of time into something I would never enjoy, or commit to ending my run through the game with a completion of the original launch content. The only classic mission left was to defeat the Shadow Lord. I opted for the latter, and canceled my renewal so that I would not forget before it auto-paid next week.

Well, turns out canceling your renewal in FFXI locks you out right then and there. When I tried to log back in after doing it, I received a notice that my account had been suspended despite that I had already paid Square-Enix to play the game through August 10th.

The ultimate consequence of all of this is that I essentially played FFXI up to the final dungeon of the game and then pulled the equivalent goof of accidentally erasing my save.

A fitting end to an endearing piece of MMO nostalgia that has failed on many levels to reshape itself into a playable product in the modern era.

The good news is FFXII comes next.

Yeah. out of interest, you playing the original for ps2 or the new zodiac job system one?

Zodiac by force. Would have preferred the original experience, but it's not on Steam.

Also "playing" isn't quite the right word for it. I haven't seen the start menu yet. :P

Zodiac by force. Would have preferred the original experience, but it's not on Steam.

Also "playing" isn't quite the right word for it. I haven't seen the start menu yet. :P

Well it's good game. you'll enjoy it.

Yeah, looking forward to it especially since I'm already very familiar with the soundtrack. Just haven't had time lately.