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>>12617103
Great overall game design, nice aesthetics, solid mechanics, excellent music. On a technical and design level it's as good or better than the other PS1 FF games.
My only real issue is that none of the characters or plotlines ever felt all that engaging. Stuff just sort of happens so there's a reason to go somewhere and it doesn't make a lasting impression. I could not tell you what the Redhead dreadlock dude's deal was and Quina just wanted to eat things and the rat girl had some kind of tragic whatever and the main villain was actually Zidane's brother and had some random motive which didn't even seem to make sense...it was almost like dream logic where shit doesn't actually connect together and you just roll with it. It was fun but it didn't feel meaningful.
Also I hated the encounter rate and the fact that there was no way to moderate it, and that the card game was pointless after Triple Triad was so useful. But unlike a lot of people I really enjoyed chocobo hot and cold. I didn't find it nearly as random or frustrating as most did, I was shocked at how many people thought it was janky.
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Visually impressive. The peak of what a company could squeeze out of the PS1's hardware. Mechanically a very boring game that had tediously long fights. An extremely forgettable story and cast. The weakest soundtrack of the PS1 FF games.
By the time 9 dropped everyone had already moved onto waiting for the PS2 and 10.
Garnet is a cute though. Shame she's part of one of the worst FF casts from the golden era.
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>>12617103
It's a serviceable FF game. Combat works ok for a JRPG, the story is somewhat interesting, and it's fairly pretty for a PSX game. If anything, I could say it's in a weird place where does most things well, but nothing really outstanding, and because of that I'm not as interested in going back to as other games in the series.
For instance, the battle mechanics are more tightly balanced than FF7 or FF8, but because of that, progression is very linear and boring. You learn new abilities via your equipment and the way it's paced, you'll often find yourself using older and weaker gear despite having found or bought better stuff. This in turn makes you grind a bit or forgo some abilities, which then makes you notice even more how slow the battle system is.
The story is reasonable but failed to excite me in most ways. It has the same problem most Japanese stories have, in that they seem to write the set pieces long before the overall plot and then have to tie them all together. Individually, things like the Iifa Tree and Terra and the Mist are neat, but overall their presentation and use within the story are fairly short and skipped over for other story beats until far later. This makes them less effective than they could've been.
FF7 had a really good plot and pacing, even if sometimes I feel like it was a happy accident. FF8's junction system at least made battle very easy and included the ability to turn off random encounters, making the game flow better as a result. FF9 struggled in those areas, resulting in a sort of dull feeling of whatever. I think the game would've been much better if it could figure out how to handle battle encounters to move the player through the game faster, even something like Chrono Trigger/Cross's setup where you saw enemies on the map would've helped.
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The synthesis system is highly underrated, and finally gives you a reason to not sell off your weaker gear the moment you get something better. It actually encourages you to collect more stuff just so you don't miss out on a powerful synthesis later on. Between that and all the optional treasure you can find and some specific grind-zones, the game really lends itself to repeat play-through's for people not using a guide.
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>>12617141
Replay it and pay attention, anon. Aside from Arumat, pretty much all of those things are developed in the game beyond your cursoury memory of it, though there's a lot of shit going on which is why you likely only remember bullet points. If the nitpicks still bother you, check out the moguri mod. Its an amazing game but its density makes it easy for stuff to go over people's heads, just keep in mind that the overal theme is about the mortal reminder.
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The world is cool and the music is great too. Most characters look great, but the more human ones look like shit and out of place (e. g. Zidane, Garnet, Beatrix, partially Eiko).
The story was largely OK, but they really should have rewritten the whole life stealing stuff to NOT make Zidane into we-have-Goku-at-home.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is a complete disaster, you always have to worry about missing stuff, and with that skills, etc. Learning skills from gear instead of having actual classes was crap, too. Fuck magic stones. The worst is that battles C R A W L and are ruined by the low damage cap, coupled with retard grindable character skills that easily hit the cap and make basically everything else obsolete, including later summons. Summons are pretty shit in this game, come to think of, not only damage-wise but how they look shitty as well. They even managed to make stealing just not fun with everything having a billion items to steal. Having Garnet randomly fuck up her actions for a large portion of the game was one of the dumbest decisions of the decade. Trance is obviously retarded as fuck and might as well go off whenever.
Basically, a good setting wasted on shit gameplay.
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>>12618145
> coupled with retard grindable character skills that easily hit the cap and make basically everything else obsolete
This is a you problem, which cascaded into most of your other complaints about stuff like trance and summons. Don't grind up to use them, or save doing so for shit like Ozma like they were intended, and the rest of the game will feel more balanced.
>Learning skills from gear instead of having actual classes was crap, too.
Fair, even though I like when its a thing like here and in FFTA. Its an interesting take on anti-grinding, the only legitimate complaint would be regarding how it interacts with missables, though IIRC there are only like one or two abilities you can actually miss because of it.
>Having Garnet randomly fuck up her actions for a large portion of the game was one of the dumbest decisions of the decade.
Honestly I thought it was great narratively, and no more limiting than stuff in other FFs like areas you can't use certain abilities. It encourages you to work around a limitation and made complete sense in regards to both the story events around it and the the game's overall theming.
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>>12617947
>and finally gives you a reason to not sell off your weaker gear the moment you get something better
Not only is this solving a problem that didn't exist (who is actually sad that their leather hat is now unused because they got an iron helm), you very much would want to sell obsolete gear in a game with a good economy explicitly so you can get the next gear upgrade. But this is Final Fantasy so you always have too much money from simply fighting battles and there's also nothing worth buying anyway because it's Final Fantasy.
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>>12618145
>>12618171
I think the problem with the Garnet-being-unreliable portion of the game is that you have a second White Mage by that point (Eiko) so you just use her instead. Garnet doesn't really have any abilities that aren't replicable by other characters, so she's just a nuisance in that state. It might be more impactful if, for example, she was the only summoner (and her summons were powerful right out of the gate) making some players choose to endure her unreliability for the sake of being able to pull off some big damage.
Come to think of it, her muteness starts right as you're given the jewels for a bunch of her summons, so that would've tied in really nicely.
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My absolute favorite in the series. I'm especially fond of chocobo hot'n'cold to the point where having played it many times over the past two decades, I've never gotten the Excalibur II and likely never will.
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>>12618323
>I think the problem with the Garnet-being-unreliable portion of the game is that you have a second White Mage by that point (Eiko) so you just use her instead.
Exactly, thats why I said it was a narrative choice. You're supposed to bench her since she just went through something very traumatic, and the overlap with Eiko further encourages this. So you either keep her in the party and embrace the limitation, or follow the intuitive choice to let her recover while substituting her out. You're framing it incorrectly.
>>12618358
You HAVE to grind frogs to boost frog drop, and thievery takes a long ass time to boost, coming from someone who steals frequently. "Outpaced" is relative, and entirely dependent on how you specifically play. Someone who never steals, doesn't spam Quina's minigames, grind dragons, etc will not have that issue.
>Garnet has nothing going for her, so she just gets benched instead.
Sounds like a pure damage min maxer, makes sense you would have these issues.
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