Controller Punch!

I can see you, you know. You’ve read the title of this article and the expression of dumbfounded confusion will soon atrophy. Maybe someone will pat you hard on the back and your face will stay that way. One can only hope.

My gripe is the Final Fantasy Franchise. FF, as it will now be referred to herein, with a numerical attachement of the game in particular when needed has been a staple of RPG awesomeness for almost 20 years (in North America, anyway) and has to date spawned 28 (according to Mr. Unreliable) games.

I fondly remember, being 11 years old, and borrowing Final Fantasy for the NES off of a friend, erasing his dads save and starting my quest. I remember buying my spells and curb stomping that fucker Garland, and then thats it. I got lost after that and would reset and beat Garland again. Sometimes I would lose to.

Then, years later, I came across a copy of Final Fantasy 3 (OR 6 IN JAPAN AS EVERY FUCKING FANBOY IS SO EAGER TO POINT OUT) and my true love for the franchise blossomed.

FF3 was an intricate tapestry of story telling, with a huge cast of characters with background story for each one! And the best part is that is wasn’t totally a fantasy setting. There was steam tech mechs that fired magic fire! There were ancient magical creatures and castles that could submerge into the desert sand and autocrossbows and that one guy who could do the hadouken. Ninjas and little girls with magic paintbrushes!  It had it all.

After that was FF: Mystic Quest. It was an RPG design to help out the n00bs who were new to the franchise get comfortable with the fact that the FF’s were the benchmark RPG’s of the mid 90′s era. FF: Mystic quest was a horrible game that was completed in a day, between naps.

For a long time, I heard nothing about any FF’s. I spent my teenage years lusting after girls and trying to find the vice that was just for me. I played street hockey, and dabbled in Magic: The Gathering. I can blame that on FF too. Yes. I played Magic cause I was waiting for the follow up to FF3 (say ‘or 6 in Japan, I fucking dare you), Final Fantasy 7.

FF7 was the pinnaccle title for the PSX. Or is the proper term ‘benchmark’? Who gives a damn? FF7 was an awesome game in all rights. Maybe not as great as FF3 in storytelling, but it held its own. And accompanied by the stellar CG cutscenes and the overall gameplay graphics there was no way it could lose. I logged so much time on FF7 that the timer had to stop counting up. 99 hrs, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Thats how long the game cares.

With FF7, the franchise seemed to pick up momentum in North America, and even spawned a movie that made about as much sense as the game, and really, that’s the way we liked it. The subsequent release of FF8 though proved to be a huge disappointment. Gunblades? A character named Squall? Stealing magic from enemies to use against other enemies? Fuck all that noise.

To make up for that blunder, they made FF9, which as far as I remember, was abouta  kid with a tail and Orko from He-Man going around and fucking shit up. I don’t remember too well the premise behind that game other than the kid with the tail had cuffs, with no sleeves attaching them to his shirt. They were wrist bands in the shape of victorian era cuffs. I don’t remember it being a bad game though, so let the artists have some credit. Who knows, maybe one day that will be a style I can laugh at in 15 years when I see some poor club kid wearing it.

Then, FFX came. And I felt offended in a way that, up until that point, only Jehovahs Witnesses could. It was boring, uninspired, and in my humble opinion, the writers were to busy jerking each other off to even bother with storytelling.

And thats what it used to be about. Storytelling. It was easy to go back and forgive the 16 bit graphics of FF3 after playing FF7 because the storytelling was captivating.

With FFX came that spin off game about a Pop band or something. I didn’t play it cause I was still hurt from FF8 and FFX.

Should have been able to use the DDR Dance Pad

Then boom, FF12 out of nowhere. And whats this? a new combat system? Was this to accent the great changes they made to levelling up a character with that node bullshit? Where the fuck were my menus? Why was the game playing itself? It was utter bullshit. It looked good though, to bad the mechanics made the game virtually un-fucking-playable.

And now, a new day, a new sunrise, and FF13 is coming, and as we saw at E3, it’s coming to the MUTHAFUCKIN’ XBOX360! That’s right. But you know, I’m not actually that excited. It looked a lot like Crisis Core for the PSP, but with only trailers to look at, I can only speculum, I mean, speculate on the games mechanics.

Mothra! Mothra!

But that’s where “the fall” comes from. The mechanics. It went from equipping relics and materia to that weird node system for upgrading. I hated the node system, and I hated the autofighting system. I mean, I’ve fallen asleep playing FF games before, but not out of boredom, I fell asleep because I had been awake for 30+ hours and I ran out of soda.

I’m not holding my breath for FF13. Sure, it looks pretty but I no longer trust the ‘innovations’ that the Square Enix boys decide to implement. And to this day, if an RPG isn’t menu based, I scoff at it like I do beggars on the street.

Now some of you may have noticed that I left out FF2 and FF4. FF2 wasn’t bad but I just couldn’t get into it. Most likely because I had played FF3 first and nothing else could compare to it. and FF4… I have no excuse. I never came across it I don’t think, unless it was numbered something else in Japan.

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4 Responses to “The Fall of Final Fantasy”