The Authoritative Final Fantasy & Bravely Default thread

Gavinrad_sl said:

Do yourself a favor and emulate the Advance remake, it's a better game.

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Is there a reason? I like the idea of playing it on my SNES, but does the Advance remake make it better? Thought I heard something about the remakes of FF6 removing some famous lines.

Gavinrad_sl said:

It's mostly the PS1 remakes that fucked up the dialogue real bad. And FF4 advance uses the PS1 dialogue, but FF6 advance is generally an improvement to the dialogue. It also fixes some bugs like mdef and vanish/doom, and has a fair chunk of extra content. I mean if you really wanna fire it up on your SNES feel free, but the advance remake is strictly an improvement.

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I'll check that out. Since I can use my Wii and emulate the Advance on that. (Always hate playing emulated games on my computer for some reason. Nice to have it on a big T.V.)

1: Hook up / network computer to T.V.
2:????????????????
3: Profit!!!!

I know everyone doesn't have the capability but it's definitely worth investing in. There are plenty of options. As far as the previous poster regarding PCSX2 emulation it doesn't take that powerful of a rig to run it. It runs mostly on your graphics card and I can run it maxed settings without lag on a Nvidia GTX 460 I bought a few years ago. Looks amazing on my 42" 1080p screen. Would probably be difficult for non-gaming laptops but most modern desktops equipped for gaming should have no problems running it, even if a few years old. There is an option to run it with CPU only instead of GPU and can do multi-threading. Might be beneficial depending on your setup.

Enob_sl said:

1: Hook up / network computer to T.V.
2:????????????????
3: Profit!!!!

I know everyone doesn't have the capability but it's definitely worth investing in. There are plenty of options. As far as the previous poster regarding PCSX2 emulation it doesn't take that powerful of a rig to run it. It runs mostly on your graphics card and I can run it maxed settings without lag on a Nvidia GTX 460 I bought a few years ago. Looks amazing on my 42" 1080p screen. Would probably be difficult for non-gaming laptops but most modern desktops equipped for gaming should have no problems running it, even if a few years old. There is an option to run it with CPU only instead of GPU and can do multi-threading. Might be beneficial depending on your setup.

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Hell yeah. I've had my rig hooked up to my 42'' 1080 LCD for about 4 years now. Its super slick, even my dude-bro non-gamer friends that come over like the PC on big screen. I mean, who can deny big fat black chicks getting reamed in 42 inches of high definition glory.

I thought Camerous ragequit?

FF7 Cosplays better than FF8 >_>

I had been thinking about starting up FF8 again and this thread got me going on it. I couldn't quite remember how playing cards worked at the start. After the opening tutorials and get Ifrit you have access to Card, Refine Lightning, Refine Fire, Refine Ice, and Refine Mid Level Magic. I started learning Card before fighting Ifrit, finished it after, and then took the time to get everything except Mid Level Magic having gained one level total. I then went and played some cards until I had 100 Tornado and 100 Thundara (picking up some Blue Magic and misc crap and magic at the same time) so I don't have to run from X-ATM092 during the mission. My total grind time thus far has been just under two hours. Then all that is left is to unlock No Encounter from Diablos when I get him and I'll be able to focus almost entirely on the story with zero random encounters and zero level grinding. The only real grinds left in the entire game will be killing Cactrots (remember to junction +Accuracy) at insane AP each to max all the GFs as soon as I can move the Garden around the map and whatever derping around I feel like doing with cards.

Reading it that way it sounds more like playing the original Legend of Zelda, going around accumulating easy money from moblins, and winding up with a white sword, blue ring, and 2 extra heart containers before even stepping foot in the first dungeon. In those situations I don't think the game itself is broken, you're just manipulating things by having a deeper knowledge of the game.

When you guys were arguing I got the impression a straight up brand new player could trivialize the entire game by playing cards almost by accident. As if they were rewarding you with late game items they shouldn't be or something. Seems like it takes at least a little preplanning to do.

I still don't think FF8 is a very good game though.

Well, the only reason I bother to go after X-ATM092 is because I always do things that I only learned were possible years later. I always save Cid in FF6 for the same reason. I didn't even know you could do that until I read it in a magazine long after the game was out. X-ATM092 is worth 50 AP the first time you "beat" him and another 50 when you beat him for real so it's a way to immediately advance Siren and get some abilities from your other GFs. I admit that fight is a Guide Dang It.

And I didn't do anything that actually breaks the game. I didn't talk about how you go and play cards to get Minimog to intentionally lose it to the Queen of Cards so you can later get Kiros and refine that card into three copies of an item that gives GFs the Auto Haste ability or any of the really broken shit. You are handed two GFs at the start of the game and get a third after the introductory tutorial. All you do is acquire a couple abilities they have and play some cards. The fact that you can completely and utterly break the game over your knee before the end of disc one is a major flaw but it isn't why the game is terrible. The game is terrible because if you play it like you would have played the prior games in the series you going to have a bad time.

So I set aside close to two hours at the start of the game to play some cards, grind up a bunch of GF abilities that allow you to refine cards in to items, and GF abilities that refine items into spells. When I got to Elvoret, the first real boss of the game and the first time you are given access to some really great magic (if you don't play cards), I timed how long long it took me to acquire 100 copies of Double for each character. It took 32 minutes. Thirty-two minutes for a full boat of one spell. If you aren't going the card route than every single spell in the game is going to be obtained through using Draw over and over. Playing the way I'm playing I didn't need to acquire Double right then and could have kept actually playing the game rather than give myself a 30+ minute timeout. I've only sporadically used Draw to pick up some copies of Cure. Oh, and don't ever cast Double because you aren't going to be able to replace it for a long time. FF8 doesn't have equipment like the previous games. Spells are basically your armor and accessories and if you try and equip everyone using only Draw the grind is ridiculous. Trying to upgrade your weapons without refining is mixture between impossible and a mega grind. All levels are empty levels. Yeah, as soon as I get Diablos I'm going to immediately grind out No Encounter. That's because there isn't any reason to actually go out and level in this game. It's a big waste of time with only a few very, very specific reasons to do so that you would never know without a trip to GameFaqs anyway. Once I've got it the game will never bother me again with a random encounter and I can spend my time moving through the game.

IhatedFinal Fantasy 8 when I first played it. Drawing sucked, I couldn't ever find what I needed to upgrade weapons, the Junction system sucked, and although I liked playing cards I always ended up with a huge mess of rules that ruined that whole part of the game for me. When I played it again almost a decade after its release I figured out some of what I was doing wrong and was able to refine that down on my own to what I outlined here. Get the GF abilities that have to do with cards and item refinement, play a bunch of cards at the start of the game, pick up No Encounter the second you get Diablos, and go about having a moderately enjoyable experience. The game got even better when I went to GameFaqs and got explanations for how things like abolishing rules and spreading rules worked. You mean I don't have to treat the rest of the world as plagued? Huzzah!

That's actually the primary problem with FF8. It doesn't play intuitively at all. It penalizes killing things and grinding (something all other FFs reward you for) as well as making the primary concept of advancement not equipment but how well you play a card game. You can do shit the hard way (draw as you kill) or the retardedly inane way (draw till max then kill. Yay 1pt increases!) or you can give in and do shit the completely backwards way of playing a card game to reasonably progress your character. The issue arises in that the backwards way is also the incredibly OP way if you spend any realistic time at all with it and spend the requisite time to get the right GF abilities.

I hate 8 for taking the FF combat/progression/style feel and marginalizing it completely in order to feed the "mini"game with cards. They really went way over the line of reason with it and it definitely puts the game in my bottom rankings for FFs, let alone RPGs in general.

Crell_sl said:

Is there a reason? I like the idea of playing it on my SNES, but does the Advance remake make it better? Thought I heard something about the remakes of FF6 removing some famous lines.

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SNES vs. GBA is completely an opinion.

Additions: The GBA adds some new espers and a new "end game" dungeon, so if you want the most content definitely go this route. If you only want to play through the game once, definitely play the GBA version since it has more stuff.

Bugs: GBA fixes a lot of weird bugs. The most famous is the evade glitch, where the evade statistic does nothing, so mblock controls your evasion against absolutely everything. You could get a few characters up to 128 mblock (gear dependent), which made them immune to everything in the game besides "sure hit" attacks that you couldn't evade. This made some of the characters really powerful. In the GBA version, evade and mblock are split correctly.

Dialogue: This is where it comes down to opinion. Ted Woolsey, the SNES translator, did not do a perfectly 100% verbatim translation of the Japanese. He instead injected a bit of his own flavor which, in my opinion, improved the game for the better. The GBA translation is a lot more "strict" but loses a lot of the humor and whimsey that Woolsey added, in exchange for some lame puns like "weapons of Magitek destruction." I definitely think the SNES translation is superior to GBA's, but general opinion seems to be split pretty 50/50. But, this is still sorta minor.

If you plan on playing through the game more than once, I'd play the SNES version and then the Advance version. If you're only going to play it once, definitely play the Advance version. Despite the slightly worse translation (again, my opinion), it's wholly a better game. It's still the best Final Fantasy title no matter which system you play it for.

I couldn't remember what I had disliked about FF8 so much until I got to the third disc with its awful and completely out of place quick time events. The game parts of FF8 also finally fall away completely and it becomes a visual novel where the only thing required of me is to move Squall around and press X when he hits his mark to start the next dump of dialogue. I had has also forgotten just how fucking grindy the whole thing is. All of the optional content has obfuscated mechanics or requires some flavor of grind or both. Now that it's beaten I can't even understand what got me playing it again in the first place. I guess I like Triple Triad?

I don't think I ever played FF9 beyond disc one, I played FF10 for less than 10 minutes, never even put its sequel in the machine, and then stopped buying them. FF8 was pretty much the end of the line for me. Even playing it years later I never went back and gave any of the later games an honest try.

FF8 was the last one I bought/played. This thread made me check out some videos on FF9, and I'm thinking about giving that one a shot. It appears to be more inline with what I might like at least.

FF8 is like the only FF I never completed (not including X-2 and the 13 games, which I have no interest in at all). FF9 is one of the best in the series. It reminds me a lot of FF4j (FF2us).

FF1 was so amazing, up until that point Dragon warrior 1 had been my favorite game and FF1 just blew it away, i play the shit out of that game with so many odd combos of classes. Then FF2 (ff4 i guess, but still ff2 for me damn it ) came out and is easily my fav game of all time. I really liked ff3(6) but I never experienced that same feeling i had with ff2 until i found everquest almost a decade later. I remember my friend picked up FF7 around the same time EQ came out and kept telling me how great it was. It was his first ff game and i was so excited to try it out. Few games have left me as disappointed as FF7 To this day i have never completed it.

Final Fantasy Tactics was the best, followed by 7, then by 10. The rest of them after the SNES era, including FF5, sucked dick.

Eh, when you consider FF5 was originally released in like 1990 or 91 (Japan, at any rate) and the US only got a legal copy in like 1998, it would have been pretty impressive for the time. But we got it almost a decade after the fact and 3d games were simply "the thing" at the time. Mechanically it is very FF, and actually substantially harder than FFIV if you don't grind a fuckload. FFIV didn't require grinding at all to be on par with mobs. FFV really did or required you to have very specific combinations of classes for much of the early game if you wanted to be successful without grinding. It isn't a bad game, it was just unleashed in legal format much too late to catch the Snes bandwagon.