Wafiti

The history nerd in me is always active, always eager to absorb the complete lineage of whatever greatly interests me. Final Fantasy XVI, and the contentiousness surrounding it, have made that side particularly active. That game exists in a peculiar crossroads of public and corporate perception, crossing through strands that are just as recent as they are decades old. And part of me dearly wants to chart it all out through an article (and potentially some kind of sprawling family tree as well.)

I've taken a lot of notes on this, don't know when I'll write it, or if I'll ever be able to. Besides other (more immediate) commitments, I'll need to play more of the associated games for a better grasp, the scope is likely too big to ever result in a single article with focus, and the newness of XVI means no idea how its legacy will shake out. This is really a zeroeth draft of multiple factors that have been bouncing around my head since last year, and below is my attempt to split them out in an orderly way:

I originally wrote this as an e-mail to a podcast which was revising its list of the 100 most influential games and taking listener feedback in consideration. Ultimately, a number of messages were not read on-air due to time constraints, and none of what I brought up was addressed on the episode.

Its a topic I'm very invested in, so I ended up going too hard (the below is a revision, the original was over 1700 words); and its all history that hasn't been properly synthesized in English anyway, so I get it. Some of my guidance on this matter came from the GameStaff wiki, which hosts a comprehensive list of every development team under both Square and Square Enix. But the go-to expert on that company history is Ryo Saito. What you read below cribs a fair amount from their researching and mapping of this stuff.

Classic RPGs endure at times better than recent outings, but I get the sense that they require certain expectations for a full experience, potentially more than other long lasting genres.

I came into Yasumi Matsuno's games with the primary impression that "these have very high quality writing", so into them I delved expecting story-rich playthroughs. From previous Final Fantasy experiences I was aware of threads being cut due to lack of time/resources and "barren" segments from the development process requiring assets to be made before the team knows what will make it into the gold master, but the lengthy stretches of combat with little to no story progression got to me.

Final Fantasy XIV is the current torch-bearer for his style, but the player experience is a complete 180: the main scenario is designed to be a brisk solo experience with story delivered at a brisk clip, while most side content does not require much effort. I'd set out for Matsuno's stories for context in where the XIV team came from and as preparation for the Return to Ivalice series, so the desire to know the main stories ahead of patch 6.5 set a tone, which meant eventually I turned on cheats for all but Final Fantasy XII, whose remaster already has a built-in speed-up function.

Final Fantasy IX is the one mainline FF I'd beaten before any of this. On my first playthrough I lost the save file for right after reaching the Outer Continent, on the second I stopped at the point of no return for most sidequests on Disc 3 and never managed to finish it. Only with the modern rerelease, packed with all sorts of cheats to make the playthrough significantly faster, did I experience the complete story. That Tactics Ogre Reborn lacks any such quality of life improvements is a massive disservice to one of the best RPGs I've ever played.

All that said however, the entire process did leave me pondering: was the slow pace of older RPGs part of the experience? Did the "nursing" of board strategies to gradually inch towards their endings, and the simmering on the morsels of story doled throughout, lead to a more enjoyable whole, despite the holes most of these games ended up with?

I do want to revisit them someday. I don't have the eye for gameplay nuances as I do for stories, but I respect the complexity that went into Tactics Ogre, as well as the elegant simplification of its systems on Final Fantasy Tactics. Having more than an eye for the impressionist whole is something I'd like to achieve, for a better understanding of how the two I enjoyed the least still have a hold on many to this day.