Phil Salvador

@shadsy

Appalling History of Havoc

he/him
obscuritory.com/

Game history librarian who's constantly poking stuff to see what happens.

Phil Salvador @shadsy11/5/2022, 8:19 PM

I haven't played JRPGs in a decade and a half, so I keep forgetting that there's playable characters who have only a tangential connection to the story with no good reason to be part of your main team. See: Irvine in FFVIII. Why does he exist.

My least popular gaming opinion is that I did not care for FFVI, and I think that was part of it? I am willing to accept that I played it 20 years ago and my memories of it are colored by being an obnoxious teenager who went into every game expecting it to be stupid, but VI never won me over. By the time it got around to characters like Relm and Umaro I was just done with it?

Maybe being away from the genre for so long has changed my opinion on this a lot, but I feel like these games could benefit from leaner casts that I can have a stronger emotion connection with, rather than a sprawling but diverse cast of hangers-on?

#games

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in reply to @shadsy's post:

Rachel Stantz @arjache11/5/2022, 8:31 PM

Ah, Chrono Cross syndrome.

(Disclaimer: I love Chrono Cross, but I very much recognize it’s not for everyone.)

moon @moon11/5/2022, 8:55 PM

I feel like FFVI suffers from following up FFV's jobs system in a way where they just translated the jobs to a really large cast of characters (and iterated on them weirdly, like there's three different blue mages?? in the form of Relm, Strago and Gau)

Zilchexo et al.@zlchxo11/5/2022, 9:36 PM

relm's abilities were junk i always just used her as a castmule... and strago and gau especially are just soooo bloated, it's mostly junk with a few spells that are so op they ruin most encounters

Zilchexo et al.@zlchxo11/5/2022, 9:29 PM

yeah i think the characters they introduce in the second half don't really get much-needed time but i think the gameplay is CHOICE. hard to think of other rpgs in which exploring the overworld is as much fun. the snes final fantasy games were just inching towards good storytelling, and i have to imagine some of that was cartridge limitations. definitely don't play them for the story, play them for fun and aesthetic (i find ff4 especially scuffed and outright buggy and rustic and dark and in a weird gothic sort of way, but it's also a pain in the ass to get through some of the difficulty spikes and the story is pants on head silly after the first bit). people HATE ff5's story (it's kind of farcical for the most part, intentionally so) but you only get 5 playable characters and there's a giant mommy sea dragon

🌊@wave11/21/2022, 10:21 PM

FF2 U.S. blew me away. so i paid 84.99 for FF3 on launch day and dived in with the eagerness. but found it a moderate let down that failed to move me in the ways i hoped.

perhaps my first encounter with the danger of having expectations.