For the SNES-era Square whore inside all of you.

[Sairon]

Final Fantasy is overrated

Final Fantasy is underrated, they don't have a single game at top 10 on gamerankings, heck not even top 20. However if you order by user ratings instead of site ratings suddenly 2 final fantasy games pop up. In my opinion Final Fantasy 7 is the greatest game ever created, and a lot of my mates thinks the same.

None of them particularly deserve to be in the top 10.  Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star 2 and 4 were arguably superior to any of the 16-bit FFs.  FF7 was quite innovative but in hindsight had a horribly overdone character development system and a completely incomprehensible plot. It was a trail blazer certainly for 3d rpgs and introduced rpgs to a large market, but it was hardly the best RPG ever or anything.  FF8 and FF9 were mediocre.  FF10 was ok but better JRPGs are out there for contemporary systems.  FF11 was poor for its genre.

FF games are like steven spielberg movies.  Generally well liked and financially successful but not particularly technically or artistically outstanding for the time they were created in.

the plot isn't completely incomprehensible in FF7, they did however not reveal everything just by following the main story arc, some information had to be hunted down yourself. For example the very important sequence where Zack and cloud is trying to escape to Midgar. The very complex story is one of the strongest points for me liking FF7, it adds a lot of replay value as well. I also loved the character development system in FF7, there were a lot of crazy combinations and a lot to toy around with. For example finding a weapon with grouped materia slots and equiping Add Effect of whatever it was called togheter with Hades, to inflict status effects on your attacks. There were LOADS of combinations which was viable. Also I think FF7 had some of the absolutely best side quests and mini games. Breeding chocobos was a lot of fun, even though I know all doesn't agree. And all the mini games at gold saucer. It had some of the best and hardest super bosses as well, emerald weapon was undefeated for a fairly long time after the game was released iirc.

Funy thing is some people dislike FF7 and love FF8, which is one of the worst games in the series imo. And then there's another camp which loves FF9, which was only a decent game when it comes to the FF series imo. Also, when you buy a FF game you always get extremly good value. They are always MANY times larger than normal games, we're not talking games which you finnish in a day, especialy not if you want to do everything.

[Fabricated]

I beg to differ, as far as artistically astounding goes, FF7 was one of the best looking reasonably early PSX games and FFVI was barnone the best looking SNES game. They've always been a leader of the pack as far as CGI goes - even outdoing teamninja.

Im going to have to disagree with you on that one.  Have you ever downloaded the roms of some of the RPG's by square and other houses that were put out on SNES after FFVI?  There are a few that are argueably better graphically looking then FFVI.  Its a shame that we never got ports of them over here, and the only way to play them is through emulator (and praying someone did a text translation patch for them)

Pretty much the only RPG released after FF6 that was on par in terms of graphics and music was Star Ocean by Enix.

[Jain Zar]

Oh there's some better stuff, but it's still by Square. So the point still stands, as far as looks go though the best WE got was FFVI (on the SNES). Simply put anyone who wasn't giddy when they saw the colors of the opening town with Locke is just lying to themselves. They know their heart jumped when they saw the color usage.

My heart aint EVER jumped at ANYTHING in a Square game. 

Ive never been impressed by FF game graphics, though some of Amano's artwork outside the game was really impressive.

[Jealous Deva]

FFVI was barnone the best looking SNES game

Sorry I don't really see it.  They're good graphics yes, but look at seiken densetsu, chrono trigger, or getting away from rpgs super metroid, mega man x3, etc.  On the whole it looks about the same as other top end contemporary stuff. 

There were loads of good looking snes games in the final days of the system, that's what snes was built for.

[Kail]

My heart aint EVER jumped at ANYTHING in a Square game. 

Yeah, me either.  I don't deny that Square's games looked good in some ways, but depending on what you think of as "important" in a game, there were a lot of areas that could have used improvement.  The character sprites in FF1-6, if I recall, had something like a grand total of twelve frames of animation, for example (plus a few emotion poses).  Enemy monster sprites had, I believe, one.  Each.

Back in the SNES day, yeah, I'll concede that they had better storylines than their competition.  But their competition was stuff like "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "Super Mario World."  Nowadays, though, just about EVERY game has something of a story, and Final Fantasy doesn't look so special anymore.  If you don't like melodrama, I can't think of a reason why you'd even look at the series anymore.

Having said that, though, I do find the games a lot more palatable on the GBA than I do on the consoles.  I generally use the GBA to kill time when I'm waiting for a bus or something, and being able to just play for five or six minutes, fight a few monsters, get a handful of gold, and then save my game after having made some measurable (if small) progress is nice.

[dusematic]

Speaking of FF, do you think they'll ever go back to the medival theme?  I don't like these worlds of guns and swords.  I like guns and lasers.  I like swords.  I don't like guns, lasers, and swords.

[SurfD]

Speaking of FF, do you think they'll ever go back to the medival theme?  I don't like these worlds of guns and swords.  I like guns and lasers.  I like swords.  I don't like guns, lasers, and swords.

Heh, now that you mention it, I was kind of hopeing they would properly complete a cycle with the whole FF franchise.
If you count ALL released FF games, they had a theme kind of thing going.
NES - 1 - 3 were very fantasy, with a bit of tech showing up as being rather rare and whatnot
Snes - 4 - 6  Still mostly fantasy, with a good swing to Tech/MagiTech by the end
PS1
7 - fairly hefty blending of tech and magic, probably evenly balanced
8 - has now swung more towards emphasis on tech then magic
9 - they smack you in the face with a switch back to FF 5-6 level balance of fantasy and tech.

I was really hopeing that FF9 would be a nearly complete tech game, with only hints of magic (as an ancient/lost art or whatever).  Then they could have started the cycle all over again with 10 and the PS2 games.