Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Oh bitch you did not just

[quote name="Nomura Dau Don"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Or is this series, like Final Fantasy, a series that's popular for no good reason?[/quote] COME ON MM, you're just asking for it now. FF games have three major features that other RPGs have just failed to do anywhere near as well: <b>1. Elaborate world-cultures that connect with each other loosely, but also leave plenty of shit implied. This includes character designs.</b> From 7 on, I honestly think this is the major draw of all FF games. They're an excuse to look at pretty - an excuse to like pretty things. They are delicious aesthetic snacks, and even before 7 we had Yoshitaka Amano greasing everyone's butthole with char art and also lavishly gay settings. It's okay to have that opera house fantasy! Dream of flight! Ride a giant chicken! Do it, faggot! FF worlds imply bigness and completeness, foreignness and yet familiarity, in a way that other RPGs just don't. Not even other Square games do this as well. I think only Morrowind surpasses them in this regard. <b>2. Characteristic grindan pacing.</b> Aside from the very first one, which was genuinely hard, grinding in all FF games share a rhythm and an input-output feel that becomes very relaxing and familiar the more you do it. I don't even know if I can explain this to a bullet hell whore like you, but there's a degree of reward which makes each battle seem worthwhile, and beyond that one is encouraged to skip grindan; below it, one never gets into it in the first place. WoW had lagom-style pacing that keeps subscriptions going, FF games are a little more satisfyingly generous. (I continue to think that Chrono Cross has the most elegant grind-defeating levelling/stuff scheme ever, and FF13's levelling system owes at least as much to CC as it does to FFX btw. Less so the crafting system.) <b>3. Characters characters characters. People get so involved in FF characters.</b> They are stereotypes. Someone once posted a summmary of Every FF Game Ever that went more or less "oh that beautiful sweet young girl! could she possibly have whatever the word for magic is in this world? and that dashing young thief, maybe he'll be obligated to help her!" that lives in the household dialog about all RPGs, and it's quite accurate. Still, the overwrought tragedies and respect/disrespect for gender roles and the personal development and the quests and the encapsulated desire to save the world .... it's gay, but Feels good, man. It's like getting to see the coolest kids from high school in their private moments of self-doubt - petty awe, petty glee, admiration and schadenfreude and sympathy. If you're not on board with it right away, I don't know that you can ever become so. It's a situationally-acquired awareness, sort of like getting past the ludicrous tropes of manga and coming to understand the character subtleties presented in so stylized a fashion. I can't think of anything recent that competes with FF on this level. Other media and productions need casts of almost literally hundreds to manage levels of fan-worship anything like Final Fantasy characters - 7 in particular. Star Trek and Star Wars come to mind, otherwise. That's how big FF is and how deeply people seem to connect with it. Anyway tl;dr - it's not popular for no reason, it's just popular for no <i>good</i> (i.e. legitimately gameplay-based) reason.[/quote]