Haha "Final", Amiright? (A General Final Fantasy Thread)

Title open to revision ;p

A thread for discussing all entries in the Final Fantasy series, from main games to sequels to crystal chronicles to tactics. Because lord knows there's too many for them all to get their own threads.

 

Oh nice!

I don't have much to say right this second but I have enjoyed a lot of FFs over the years. FF2 was probably the first big RPG I actually played all the way through.

 

@Socket Ok, so, Noctis/Gladiolus/Prompto/Ignis Reincarnation AU, go. This is going off a premise of they were all in a relationship during the roadtrip, Noctis takes a rock nap for 10 years and after that there's not a lot of time or energy to like, clarify things, and then Noctis ascends to a higher plane.

....And Prompto and Gladio and Ignis live on. They live until their 80s or longer, helping the people of the world rebuild structure and self-sustaining government and trying their best to honor Noct. And things are different with him gone- but they'd gotten used to that already, and they spend their years together. They have kids (twins named Stella and Aster Amicitia, because family is Super Important to Glads and Prompto and Ignis are ok with the kids not having their names), they have grandkids, eventually they even have stability, in a world rebuilding. Eventually, they all pass away.

(Sidenote: This is part of my longstanding AU where Whatever Lightning Returns Happened reincarnates all the FF characters- All Of Them- into a world extremely similar to our world, with their memories intact because Bullshit Magic People.)

When they are born again, Prompto and Ignis are lucky enough to live in the same rural community and go to the same school, and together they manage to scour the internet and find Gladio at roughly middle school, and the three of them manage a partially long distance relationship with plans to all go to the same college Come Hell or High Water. And see, they all still think that Noctis is some kind of Ascendant God Spirit. They don't expect to ever meet him in this world, or ever meet him again.

And then at age 16 Prompto's family moves to the Big City, and who is in his new high school but Noctis.

So yeah, the story mostly revolves around Noctis being back, and how they are all of course super happy but the others lived full lives without him and it is strange and awkward and all of them are desperately in love but not sure what to do or how to be. Also featuring soft butch Luna and Cindy/Aranea.

 

Very specific it may be, but that is a Very Good AU and if someone wrote that story I'd heckin dig it!! Especially because reincarnation AUs are what my broken little heart needs after that game. And Cindy/Aranea is very yes.

 

I never got anything more than eh out of Cindy/Luna but Condy/Aranea is a disastermobile I can get behind.

I also kinda ship Iris/Luna- Iris is very open, emotive, and caring, and even when she tries to hide things only a brick wouldn't see through her. I think that's kinda what Luna needs- someone very open and caring.

 

This is my headcanon reincarnation Luna, except usually her aesthetic is more "rolls out of bed and grabs the first hoodie she sees." She still dresses up when she wants to, but it's when she wants to, and a lot of the time she's just tired.

 

FF2 as in Star Wars but you anticlimactically kill Palpatine and then he takes over hell and you have to less-anticlimactically fight him as a demon lord (or turn him into a toad), or FF2 as in FF4, but they didn't release 2 and 3 overseas so they labeled it 2 instead?

 

The first one! In the form of the remastered GBA version.

The numbering confused me so much. I could not figure out why the same game was being called 6 in some places and 3 in others.

ETA: I was 12 and had pneumonia at the time I played 6, so maybe I had a bit more reason to be confused by the whole numbering thing than usual.

 

Ah, so the version where you can't break the game by turning everything into a toad. :::PPP

 

(Seriously, there's a FF2 LP where they beat the final boss by casting Wall on him, casting a level 1 Toad spell, and when Wall blocks the Toad spell it says "FAILED" but the animation still goes off, causing him to turn into a toad and hop away. Battle over. It's beautiful.)

 

HELLO I AM HERE I should dig up my gigantic Why I Love FF9 post at some point but boy howdy do I love FF9. Haven't played the most recent one because I don't have that console but I've played most of the others. They are Good.

 

I've play 4, 6, 7, 10, most of 9 but haven't finished it, and a bit of 8 and 3.

ETA: Oh, and I've heard a LOT about 14 secondhand from Sibling.

 

I've played, lemme think. 1, part of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a bit of X-2, and most of 12, plus i've played 14 on and off and just got back into it. Gave 11 a try but without friends to play with it was just too steep. I've also played Tactics, parts of Tactics Advance and A-2, Ring of Fates, Echoes of Time, and probably a couple of other side games?

There's a whole heck of a lot of fun games in that series.

 

2, 5, 6, 7, 9, most of 10, a lot of 14, and some of 15 here. Plus Tactics Advance and A-2.

 

The games I know pretty well are 4, 7, 8,10, 13, 15, Dissidia, and Tactics, with a cursory knowledge of mooost of the others? Except the very obscure sidegames.

 

7 was a keystone for my childhood. I was... 7 or 8 when I played it?

Funny story: I had trouble just getting past the first disk because I was untreated-but-aware-of-it ADHD, and my parents let me play their saves as long as I didn't save over them- I mostly did it just to goof around, ride colored chocobos and stuff. But dad had a save riiiight at the end of the game and one day my cousin egged me on into playing it (I wasn't interested because it was End Game, no goofing around. If I wanted to do Serious Plot stuff I had my own save) so I did. I thought I was doing pretty well when I beat the last incarnation of Jenova, because she was a bitch to fight all through the game. And then I fought the multi-part Sephiroth that dad was stuck against... and won?

So we called dad in during the Long Black Screen because holy shit 8-year-old me just BEAT weird mutant Sephiroth. On my first try, just fucking around! And then the music starts. And he does his one-winged angel shit. Casts meteor, Jupiter's now a doughnut, rock falls everyone dies.

But still. My dad still brags about it :D

I played 8 and got about halfway through. Didn't have a lot of patience for Squall honestly. I attempted 1 and 2 on the GBA but ADHD struck again. I think I also attempted 3/6 on a SNES emulator but -jazz hands- ADHD! and also I kept getting confused about which it was which made remembering to play it harder.

I've Acquired X and X-2 because they were the keystone games for my moirail so I wanna play them. I can probably get 9 too now that I think about it. But the turn-based style isn't something I do a lot these days so it... feels weird? Takes me a while to fall back into it.

I stopped paying attention at XI honestly.

 

I've played the most of 6, including a low-level run just for the hell of it.

I started 7 and burnt out a couple of times before I picked it back up again and played it to the end- I'm glad I did, because while I split the game's balance so wide the hell open that when I fought Sephiroth he never even got to USE Meteor, I was genuinely surprised by how well a lot of the story was told (I didn't have expectations all that high, thanks to the all-consuming hype machine and how inaccurate fandom osmosis is).

I was also surprised at how much I enjoyed 4, considering it's older than me and it's pretty apparent they were still figuring out how to tell deep character-driven stories in video games.

I got to the start of Disc 2 in FF8 and also gave up in large part because I disliked Squall, so, same hat.

My relationship with 10 is deeply complicated by the fact that I'm pretty sure my favorite game in the world is in part a reaction to it, as well as the fact that I really enjoy the combat and worldbuilding but haaate a lot of the story and writing choices. And most of the outfits.

I think a lot of my problems with finishing 9 boil down to the fact that the breadth of the gameplay (gajillions of often-irrelevant, time-consuming, plot-light sidequests and minigames) doesn't play well with my completionism and makes for a recipe for burnout, but other than that I enjoy it quite a bit.

 

I forgot that I have played a lot of Theater Rhythm and TR: Curtain Call.

 

Me when FFXV first came out: Yeah I don't think its that good the characterization is weak and the pacing is wonky and it does even worse with its female characters than most final fantasies
Me now: I fucking love these boys

 

I've only played 9... It wasn't really a part of my childhood but. 9 is really good.

I'm planning on playing 4 + 6 next based on recs I got. What're people's favs?