Board 8 > Do you think final fantasy will ever return to the golden age

(+) Yeah! (+)

I imagine most people would rank 6-10 well above the rest, it seems like they've really lost their touch in the last two generations. 7 remake seems to be well regarded, but it's still a remake; they haven't been able to tell an original story in some time. Is there any hope for the franchise or will it just be mediocrity until the end?

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we haven't been there since 2001

so it's very unlikely we return to the golden age at this point

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Video games have changed. No.
Sometimes I feel like the only game that has not fundamentally changed over the past 20 years is Counter Strike.

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their golden age is defined as the games FF6-FF10 and they're remaking 7, so clearly they returned to the golden age

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I want to hope 16 is a return to form.

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Their games take much more resources, money and time to make these days, even if they manage to make a beloved new entry they're not gonna pump them out with the same staff etc at a rapid speed like they did back in the late 90s.

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I'd say 7R is a return.

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Depends on what you mean by "golden age". Do you just mean a string of well-told stories set in interesting worlds with solid gameplay? If so, there's no reason to think they can't get back there. 7R sounds like it's already got the ball rolling, and 16 could very well continue it.

If you're specifically asking for a return to the 6-10 style of turn-based/ATB RPGs, or for them to go back to firing out a game every year or two, then no. The genre has widely moved on from both of those things and won't likely be returning.

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Nah, the golden age is over, and that's okay.

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A timeline of Square's existence:

Years 0-7: Time before the golden age
Years 8-15: The Golden Age
Years 16-35: Everything else

My money is on no.
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if they take what they learned from 7R from a battle system perspective, maybe

cause that was the best battle system in like 2 decades

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No

FF14 is the best FF game though

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You mean that we will get a new amazing Final Fantasy almost every year? Yeah no.

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I think most Final Fantasy fans are in their 30s and will never be 10-13 years old again, so probably not

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I think 16 has a lot of potential.

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If you want to experience the golden age vicariously just play XIV!

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

If you want to experience the golden age vicariously just play XIV!

nah

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Hot take: Square has never been all that consistently good at game design. Identifying a fun mechanic and putting it in your game is not good game design. Making the fun mechanic play well with the other fun mechanics in your game is good game design. Their games are full of things that make you go "oh that's cute" like killing robots by stealing parts from them or killing zombies by phoenix downing them, but too many supposedly-different options boil down to being the same thing. Spamming firaga isn't actually different from spamming attack, and that sucks because summoning a giant fireball to blow the enemy up should feel awesome.

edit i guess what i'm saying is square is bad at making you feel like spiderman

However, you do intermittently feel like spiderman in FFX when you have to stack positive status effects on your characters and plan out your moves in advance. And arguably you feel like spiderman when Mallow uses thunderbolt or peach uses group hug in smrpg, because at least those options feel mostly mechanically unique.

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No.

Square right now actually isn't that bad, but Final Fantasy does suck now (7 Remake is the exception so far).

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7R is a return in every way. It's literally a return, and it's also radical enough to prove that they can do good narrative and design again. XV also showed that their original narratives have the potential to be great, if they just finish them.

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foolm0r0n posted...

7R is a return in every way. It's literally a return, and it's also radical enough to prove that they can do good narrative and design again. XV also showed that their original narratives have the potential to be great, if they just finish them.

Are the non-story parts of the game fun for gameplay reasons? Like the hitting people with swords and puzzles and stuff?

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Would be kind of hypocritical of me to start yelling about how XIV is one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made and the best thing SE has going for them right now when I did not give two shits about giving it the time of day just a month and a half ago.

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I wish I could hit people with puzzles.

The gameplay is hit or miss, but I enjoyed it. It takes a while to really get the hang of how to best use it.

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LeonhartFour posted...

I wish I could hit people with puzzles.

The gameplay is hit or miss, but I enjoyed it. It takes a while to really get the hang of how to best use it.

stfu nerd *hits u w/ puzzle*

When you say it takes a while to get the hang of, would you say that's for good reasons or bad reasons?

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Each character plays differently, and you can only control one character at a time, so it's just a learning curve more than anything else.

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NeatoAnAccount posted...

Hot take: Square has never been all that consistently good at game design

That's BS. What you're describing is basically that turn-based RPGs are boring because it's all just clicking a menu option. Attacks, items, spells, and even overdrives are really all the same thing, and probably use the same code too. That's the case with every turn-based RPG from FF1 to FFX and non-Square too.

But Square has always been able to do a lot with that dirt simple menu combat. The dramatic camera angles and animations. Firaga does end up feeling a lot more epic than Fire even though it's mechanically the same. The aeon summonings are always satisfying even though the aeon gameplay is way more simple. And most importantly, the characterization in the combat makes it feel way more important than just selecting a menu option. That's what good design it - doing a lot with a little (aka emergence).

XV had a ton of great design like that too. Huge characterization in all aspects of gameplay. It's also still the only game that has achieved a real day-night cycle.

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Why's the writing gotta be so bad tho

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

Would be kind of hypocritical of me to start yelling about how XIV is one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made and the best thing SE has going for them right now when I did not give two shits about giving it the time of day just a month and a half ago.

I mean I would be in that exact same boat if my friends didn't randomly convince me to try it out a few years back

People just have preconceived notions about MMOs, which to be fair are mostly true for most MMOs. The notion that an MMO might have the best story in a single-player driven franchise is really hard to get across.

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I mean for God's sake the most recent primary villain surpassed Kefka's as my #1 FF bad guy.

Do you have any idea how solid Keka's #1 position was??

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

I mean for God's sake the most recent primary villain surpassed Kefka's as my #1 FF bad guy.

Do you have any idea how solid Keka's #1 position was??

not solid enough that an mmo villain couldnt beat him LMAO

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foolm0r0n posted...

That's BS. What you're describing is basically that turn-based RPGs are boring because it's all just clicking a menu option. Attacks, items, spells, and even overdrives are really all the same thing, and probably use the same code too. That's the case with every turn-based RPG from FF1 to FFX and non-Square too.

But Square has always been able to do a lot with that dirt simple menu combat. The dramatic camera angles and animations. Firaga does end up feeling a lot more epic than Fire even though it's mechanically the same. The aeon summonings are always satisfying even though the aeon gameplay is way more simple. And most importantly, the characterization in the combat makes it feel way more important than just selecting a menu option. That's what good design it - doing a lot with a little (aka emergence).

XV had a ton of great design like that too. Huge characterization in all aspects of gameplay. It's also still the only game that has achieved a real day-night cycle.

Turn-based RPG's are my favorite genre. I played Omori twice in a row because I wanted to fight the superbosses. I have played LISA the Painful a million times. I did a low-level game of Paper Mario. There are a million ways to make them fun.

"And most importantly, the characterization in the combat makes it feel way more important than just selecting a menu option. That's what good design it - doing a lot with a little (aka emergence)."

I mostly agree with you for FFX. Auron never gains any magic attack, the mages never gain any physical attack, Rikku gains infinite speed, and the characters mostly have radically different abilities. The combat's bad game design mostly happens at the endgame. The real problem is the minigames and this really boring stretch right before the end.

However I'm playing FF7 and that doesn't apply here. I'm currently at Junon, and so far every character plays almost the same. Every character's better at magic than physical attacks. There is no real difference between fire, thunder, and ice unless one of the enemies happens to take more damage from one of them. Every character is equally apathetic to enemy attacks. The The ATB system should make combat more challenging but it just makes it slower to mash.

Every character can equip any materia. Every materia's stat bonuses are negligible, so I only care about the ability. The only materia I've ever seen where I care who gets it is Cover, which goes on the character whose limit I want to active most frequently (currently Aeris), and I guess Cure which goes on my weakest mage (Barret). Except for the Midgar Zolom, I could have resolved every fight thus far by selecting a spell, closing my eyes, and mashing circle until I hear the victory music. The individually interesting elements (materia, ATB, physical and magical attackers, fire and ice, etc) were implemented in a boring way. And the minigames are even worse than FFX (at least so far. I have done the marching minigame with the ratings score, and the one where you have to jump onto a rope).

Pokemon is a game whose types actually matter. Fairy types and rock types are completely different. Fairies have lots of HP and special defense, and rock types have lots of attack and defense. Their moves are supereffective against different types, which are also completely different from each other. It's easy to understand when a move will be effective against the target.

Have you critically played any mid-90's JRPG's recently? Play through them and try to imagine the first user experience, and try to imagine how you'd change them with the benefit of hindsight. It's entirely possible that I'm just a hater but it's unsurprising that 25-year-old games make mistakes that recent games have learned from. Modern JRPGs are so much more efficient with your time.

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RikkuAlmighty posted...

I'd say 7R is a return.

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It's basically impossible, since during the golden age they were releasing games that many would say were at the peak of the genre on a yearly basis, and now you're lucky if you get one of even remotely that quality once every 5 years

That said 7R was really really good, but I'm not sure how much credit they get for simply returning to the well of the golden age as opposed to creating Midgar and that whole world in the first place.
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XIII_rocks posted...

It's basically impossible, since during the golden age they were releasing games that many would say were at the peak of the genre on a yearly basis

That still blows my mind, looking back.

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Regarding original post, I wouldn't discount 7 just because it's a remake. I would think it's a miracle if SE makes a good game remake or not, since it would at least mean that nothing's stopping them from making an equally good game with an original story.

Gaming as a whole left the golden age many years ago, so I don't see how FF would magically return to it, either.

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I am a huge FF fan and I say no. I still haven't played FF 15 and FF 7 R myself too. When it is the general consensus that FF 10 is the last great FF you know something is wrong.

And you may say hey FF 7 R is great too! WHEN it is completed then we will talk.

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Most FF games are extremely mediocre anyway if you take a step back and look at the whole series, they are cheesy as fuck and most of the stories and the way characters react/sound are very childlike, you need to be niave to really enjoy the games.

To me, in the move to full 3d environments, the games have lost their charm and that charm was memorable perspectives within each location, they were intimate portrayals of the game world which were immersive, the perspectives within each location complimented the story beats and that's why they were so memorable.

I've only just finished FF7 remake and I've already forgotten about most of the locations, just narrow straight lines connecting to big empty spaces and repeat.

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Safer_777 posted...

And you may say hey FF 7 R is great too! WHEN it is completed then we will talk.

You shouldn't think of it like this. Also play it Mr so-called "huge FF fan" lol. It's free on PS+ so no more excuses.

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III-URBAN-III posted...

Most FF games are extremely mediocre anyway if you take a step back and look at the whole series, they are cheesy as fuck and most of the stories and the way characters react/sound are very childlike, you need to be niave to really enjoy the games.

Watch out everyone! Weve got a tough guy over here!


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