When are we allowed to admit that the first game of the trilogy was and is still pretty good?

Okay. Having shit taste for a long time does not mean you don't have shit taste. It just means you've had it for a long time.

Liking FF13 is shit taste though, sweetie.
FF7 Rebirth has great ARPG combat and the cast chemistry is top notch.

Ladies ladies, both your games are shit. No need to fight about it.

And it this mentality that led to Rebirth selling 2 million, and XIII to selling 9.6 million. Now cope.

this, honestly, fighting over who's the least shit matters little when they're both so abhorrently bad

and XIII to selling 9.6 million. Now cope.

it came packaged with xbox 360 at one point

It was critically panned.
Which should tell you that 9.6 million was largely on the back of FF10's momentum.

And Rebirth came with Remake.

Yeah? And how'd Rebirth fail to capitalize on Remake's 7 million sales momentum?
Also FF10 came out in 2001, while FF13 came out in 2009.
8 years is hardly a "momentum".

FF17 did it better

8 years is hardly a "momentum".

The term I was going for was "goodwill".
FF13 cashed in on the goodwill of all of its predecessors and returned almost nothing on its own.

Final Fantasy thread turns into more Rebirth-divisionism

This franchise is fucking ruined. Remaking FF7 was the worst idea SE has ever had. They must have sliced their fanbase in half with this shit, and in half again with Rebirth.

True.

XIII always have the worst threads

This franchise is fucking ruined. Remaking FF7 was the worst idea SE has ever had. They must have sliced their fanbase in half with this shit, and in half again with Rebirth.

Remaking FF7 was theleast best decision they could have made at the time IMO.
After the dark era of FF13, you really had to swing for the fences and I think they at least recaptured their diehard fans back.

Fair enough, I'll agree with that.

You're just going to let him go despite using the wrong word? Faggot.

We're not PHDs having a philosophical debate at a university, we're talking about video game on a dead image board. He chose the wrong word, but when he clarified it made sense.

they at least recaptured their diehard fans back

Rebirth sold 2 million units and is now dead in the water in terms of sales.
The original Final Fantasy 7 sold 15 million units. Their "diehard fans" have been finding other games since, ironically enough considering the OP, FF13.

LR was the best one and it's not even close, too bad no one actually cared about XIII at that point to give it a chance

NOOOOOOO WHY DON'T YOU MOCK HIM OVER MINOR ERROR?!?!?!?

fucking kys

Visually it's gorgeous. I'd say it even still looks amazing by today's standards.
The soundtrack is exceptional.

Everything else about it is bad. The battle system with stagger and paradigm shifting seems to have depth at first but it very quickly becomes clear what the obvious strategy is to stagger any enemy, and very little matters beyond buffing/healing yourself when you're not just going balls-out to stagger.

The characters are laughably 1-dimensional even for a JRPG, to the point of near-parody like in the case of Snow.
The story is a disjointed fever dream that never bothers to explain itself unless you want to read a bunch of datalog entries, which may at first give you the illusion of depth until you realize that beyond all the made-up terminology like Fal'cie and L'cie etc. etc. the story still boils down to the same thing every JRPG has for the last 30 years

the Big Bad is like god or something but more like an evil god so you have to kill him to free yourself from fate because it's your fate to kill him

or whatever

That alone would still make it somewhere in the mid-tier for Final Fantasy titles, but the problem is compounded by the extreme linearity of the game. FFX is linear too, but it makes up for it in other areas so people are more forgiving. XIII is 100% completely on rails with tutorials still popping up 30 hours into the game, until you finally get SOME limited freedom on Gran Pulse where you can choose to do a bunch of pointless sidequests, if you want.

The girls are hot though

Enter Final Fantasy thread

Jimbo is coping and seething about Final Fantasy and pulling fake sales figures for Rebirth out of his ass, as per usual

Mental illness.

You're coping, the game is worse than you remember anon.
Somehow, it got even worse in the sequels. This game also was the first one to feature microtransactions and there were way too many.

Sony give their friends rewards

Delusional.

I don't think the actual graphics looks good, but I remember enjoying the artstyle. Even when it came out it didn't have a particularly "timeless" look, meaning it would age fast (and it has).

I can hardly wait for your salty schizo tears when this drops.

Me neither. They're trying to sell "the popular one" again, having given up on Flopbirth.

Maybe I'm just a grandpa with bad eyes, but I really do think it still holds up at the very least

NTA but ehr, there's a 4k patch that fixes a lot the actual texture issues, and you can play around with the engine to make it look more presentable. It looks okay, but the actual artstyle is more catchy than the graphical fidelity.

No because I haven't played it yet. So far
VII>VI>IV>III>VIII>IX>I>II>V

meaning it would age fast (and it has).

It has definitely not aged, the UI and environments are still amazing even by today's standards.

it's what finally made me give up on Square for good.

I fell off when they announced it was going to be a trilogy. I played XIII and thought "oh well this wasn't their best, next one will be good though, I'm sure", but it wasn't. After 3 botched Lightning games and then the catastrophe that was XV, I was officially done with the franchise. FF7 Remake tempted me back, so I made an exception, but all it did was piss on the FF7 legacy so I never bothered finishing it.

Have the scrubbed Toriyama's rose presentation from the internet?
That shit was cringekino and I'd love to rewatch it.

fuck man, I spent my own money on this polished turd back in the day. Got filtered by the boss that turned into bikes or something but I was pretty much checked out by that point

I think people might have been willing to forget and forgive XIII if it had just been a one-off
instead we had 2 sequels literally nobody asked for that took up the ENTIRE PS3 GENERATION

Remaking FF7 was the worst idea SE has ever had.

correction, not remaking FF7 was the worst idea SE has ever had because remake and rebirth are sequel to OG FF7. if they actually remade the game as is with extra polish in graphics and extra contents while without kingdom hearts nonsense added to it, they'd actually buy Japan with all money they receive.

True. A LOT of people I knew bought the PS3 for the Japanese games (this was before we knew it wouldn't have any games), and FF was a big hitter back then. A real system seller.

Typing this out, my lord, this franchise has fallen far.

I just accepted a long time ago that they had a golden run from like 6-10 and debatably 12 and that's a great run of great games so kudos to them
but the company that made those games no longer exists
there was just something in the water in japan from 1990 to 2000

13 was the death of the series.
12 was the first signs of rot.
10 was the harbinger of the end.

Crazy that 11 is still the best FF receiving support

I went in to it expecting the hate for it to be overblown, especially since I have nothing against linearity. I ended up deciding that it isn't hated enough, or at least not for the right reasons. The game essentially being one long hallway is the least of its problems.

X-2 was the end of an era. It showed that the company was no longer the Squaresoft that everyone knew.

i agree
10 was (almost) just as linear and it never get shat on for that
13 was worse in so many other ways

X-2 was wasn't bad, apart from being nearly 100% reused assets and not being anywhere near as good as FFX. Garment Grid system was cool

Care to elaborate? I always enjoy hearing how and why people came to hate this game. I agree that the linearity is just the nail in the coffin of a much larger shitshow.
It's almost flawed from the ground up. Like some games you can say "well the idea was good on paper" but with XIII it's like none of it works, at all
It only limps by on the soundtrack and visuals being a spectacle, but even those elements break down under scrutiny

Not that anon, but the biggest problem the game has is that it doesn't let you engage with its world. The only interaction you have is battles, even the shop is a fucking cube or something. They created this huge interesting world and didn't let you engage. FFX by comparison constantly has interesting NPCs, towns and other diversions.

FF13's world looks more interesting in the sequels desu. The PC ports suck ass and I can't be bothered to deal with them rn, can someone tell me if it gets better in 2 and LR?

This is a good point. Part of the reason everyone called it a hallway simulator or a on-rails-RPG or whatever wasn't solely because it was linear (it was incredibly linear, don't get me wrong, but that wasn't the ONLY reason): it got called that because the world looked very interesting from said hallway. A lot of stuff was happening in big beautiful vistas and you could tell a lot of thought was put into the aesthetic and the culture and how the NPCs interacted with the world and it's systems.

The problem was that you as the player never got to partake IN said interactions. It was always something that was implied to take place but you never got to see it or feel the effects of it. You could look out on it and make assumptions, but never anything more.

In contrast, in FF8, your first SeeD mission is to go help in Timber. You could talk to tons of people in Timber that were far from mission-critical, you could hear what they were thinking about, how they felt about the situation, how the local and national culture supported or hated the current climate. This made the world feel lived in.
FF8 had a ton of problems by the way but it never lacked in this regard.

PC ports suck ass

FFX/X-2 port being dogshit was the last straw for me with Square Enix. Holy fucking shit, how do you implement them so fucking poorly, to the point it does dumb shit like trying to use your integrated graphics instead of your GPU and crashing out as a result.

Final fantasy consumes my life and that's probably why I'll never have a wife

i say X-2 was the first signs. by 12, it was hard to miss.

Final Fantasy would still be turn-based if you would have bought turn-based Final Fantasy games when you had the chance.

You only have yourself to blame.

Remember that time you went to the amusement park and thought it was going to be like the gold saucer and you got 0 mini games, 0 fun and were stuck playing with the C team.

Moms are tough

Never fucking ever will you utter this trite in the same sentence as being good.

There was an amusement park in 8? I don't remember that.

Never because the entire XIII trilogy is dogshit and no amount of contrarianism or history revisionism is ever gonna change that

Implying it wouldn't just be schizos arguing about FFXVI otherwise

No one gives a shit about XVI. A fart in the wind, it came and went, left no legacy, no cultural impact, not even worth bringing up.
At least Rebirth is hated for good reason.

I bought this on sale this weekend to give it another fair try. Same with 8 since I wonder sometimes if I was too harsh when I was younger.

He's talking about the part in XIII with Sazh and Vanille. The only time in the game when non-battle NPCs even appear and you can't even speak to them

13 has huge issues, and you're about to rediscover them.
8 has issues too, but it's more of an "acquired taste".
No amount of bizarre preference will make you think 13 is a good game.

Oh I thought he was on about 8.
Everything about XIII is such a blur, and it's weird that I remember FF8 from a million years ago more clearly than FF13 which I first played in 2023.

How come every FF thread that isn't about Remake/Rebirth/Retarded actually has good discussions in them while that is never true of the former?

FF7 remake is bad + has a schizo so every thread it him schizoing while people try to trigger him cause it's funny

There's nothing to discuss. It's just Marvel-tier brown slop that exists as a butchering of a once-great classic. Waifuposting is literally the only reason Anon Babble hasn't memoryholed the entire FF7R franchise.

I really loved 13 when it came out. I had an expectation it would be dogshit but i ended up really enjoying it

FF13 was shit and will forever be shit. When you rip out every single RPG-like feature from your game and turn it into a linear string of button-mashing fights so boring they might as well be cutscenes, you deserve all the shit you get.

I feel the same way about XIII. I'm always up to bat to shit on it and its sequels because I hated them, but I haven't played them since 2019 so my memory is always fuzzy when it comes down to specifics.
Pretty much all I remember from XIII is

The start where Lightning is a cunt and tries to ditch Sazh in a warzone

Autobattle + Libra being viable for pretty much the entire game

That one Gold Saucer knockoff section

The disappointment when I got to Gran Pulse and realised that "the game opens up" just meant that the hallways became wider

Because everyone who liked Final Fantasy hates FF7R and all it's bastard-sequels. If you want to discuss Final Fantasy, you don't want to discuss FF7R.
It's that simple.

youtube.com/watch?v=RPtq1Bpf6q4

Had some alright music though.

Played it with a friend and that made it bearable, we were able to muscle through thanks to taking breaks to just look at the pretty pictures and listen to the good music.

12 was fun.

Because 7R threads are a hotbed for shippers and schizos (arguing both for and against the remakes).

The disappointment when I got to Gran Pulse and realised that "the game opens up" just meant that the hallways became wider

This. Everyone I knew who defended this game (trust me, no longer in my life) told me it got so much better when the game opened up at Gran Pulse.
Faggot, having a bigger hallway is still a fucking hallway. I'm still mad.

Whoa, it's just like dark souls

Heard defenders say the hunts made the combat good

Did a few

Literally just some recolours that I have to backtrack to and fight

God I fucking hated that shit

they're just not good video games
and don't get me wrong, XIII wasn't good either, but at least it's interesting bad
FF7R isn't even that

Why do some of the worst games have the best music? French horns are fucking based and should be in every soundtrack.

The 13-2 is better, but as I've been playing all the numbered games in a row again, up to 12 I am shocked to realize that I think 13 is going to end up as my 3rd favourite mainline.

Agree. It's a very soulful instrument.

XIII wasn't good either, but at least it's interesting bad

This kinda sums up my feelings too. You can talk about 12, 13 and even 15 to some extent because it was interesting-bad. Like, it's shit, but at least there's stuff happening that's very clearly experimental and imaginative and none of it worked but it's so creative it's almost worth discussing simply because it's there.
The 7 remakes don't have that quality. They're just slow filler-heavy trash that makes me wonder who the audience for this even is.

In 20 years people will still talk about the OG FF7 but the remake-project is going to be seen as an expensive lifeless husk.

I too am shocked that you have such awful fucking taste

I don't think 12 is outright bad.

I am shocked to realize that I think 13 is going to end up as my 3rd favourite mainline

Explain yourself immediately. I'm not going to try to talk you out of your taste, but you need to rationalize this shit a little.

bought the PS3 for the Japanese games

FF versus XIII and and KH3 in particular in my case.

The 7 remakes don't have that quality. They're just slow filler-heavy trash that makes me wonder who the audience for this even is.

Agreed, I'd argue even Jack's game is worth talking about, despite it's huge flaws.

jfc there was a trilogy? how the fuck did they get away with that

Me too Anon, me too. I've never seen a company piss away a fanbase quite like Square fucking Enix.

NTA, but I initially liked 12 because the introduction was a big fuck off war between nation states and I thought we would get an FFT-esque tale of intrigue, but it was just some bullshit chasing around MacGuffin Magicite until you get to the Big Bad at the End who turns on you despite being all about 'order'.

For a game that gets its story hyped up, it's not even as fucking good as FFX, which is basically 'religious government bad, my story goes brrrrr'

I agree the story is the weakest part but I quite liked the moment to moment gameplay and a lot of the side content like the hunts and getting new equipment and filling out your board. It's flawed, heavily so, but I'd just say it's still in the firmly fine tier.

The only "good bits" I remember from FF12 was that it was kinda fun to be a desert monster hunter, the character customization wasn't particularly engaging (I still don't think the license board was implemented well) but the Zodiac version helped a little with dual-classing.

Spent a shitload of money on assets and an engine for FFXIII

It gets decent critical acclaim from reviewers before fans try it and shit on it

FFXIV 1.0 comes out and completely bombs, costing Squenix a bunch of money

Shit out some cheap FFXIII sequels using recycled assets and a recycled engine to try and recoup costs

You forget:

YoshiP clones WoW to save XIV

Now this is going off my memory of it 10 years ago so it might get betrayed like most of them.

It's the one that works best at making it's ensemble cast work nicely.

It's probably the only one outside of DS 4 which has some proper bosses that have you engage with the mechanics in the main game Robo Bulbasaur, Barthandelus and Cid for example.

Shiva bike

It's probably more so the other games do more wrong than I remembered, 10 suffered the most from this and I was already aware that it was a hallway RPG last time I played it. I am absolutely expecting to get frustrated with the paradigm switching animation, but they at least fix that in 13-2.

ff13 is a souless empty world with trash characters. it was never good

DS 4

I always thought it was unrated.

But enough about FF16

I remember playing as a gun-healer. Shit was based.

I can tell how young you are what with not mentioning X-2 in any capacity. That was the absolute tipping point. Complete mass hysteria upon it's reveal. People asking what the actual fuck was going on and if it was some sort of morbid prank. It revealed to the world that they -truly- had no idea what the fuck they were doing anymore and just grinding up VII money snorting that shit to kingdom come.

Complete mass hysteria upon it's reveal. People asking what the actual fuck was going on

Nah. 33 year old here and the reaction was mostly just 'weird spinoff but okay'.
The brand name wasn't hurt until 13

I'm 27 so I'm not that young. FF10 was my first FF game and I didn't play FF10-2 until I was well into my 20s (between that those two I played a bunch of the old PS1 FF games and some of the SNES ones too).
I can't stand modern Final Fantasy though. Don't know how people manage it.

This. People were already kind of iffy about 12 but most people accepted that it was at least alright. 13 was where a lot of people started going outright bad, though I personally believe that Square could have salvaged the situation completely if they'd just moved on to 15 right away instead of waiting like a decade and releasing a bunch of spin-offs of a game no one liked

It didn't really help that they promised FF13, FF15 and KH3 on the PS3 yet instead chose to ride that ENTIRE generation on Lightning's non-existing ass.

I realized I typed "FF15", I meant Versus, of course.

It doesn't help that they spent so much time and money on making Crystal tools and then realized it was not malleable at all.

I still think the engine was alright. It looked amazing for its time.

THIS GAME WAS SO SHITTY IT CRATERED DECADES OF GOODWILL BUILT UP BY JAPS AFTER THEY GOT NUKED INTO OBLIVION AND BACK AGAIN

What? You didn't want to the worst performing MMO for that time on that engine? cmon man

The assets looked alright. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors and part of the reason nobody wants to port these fucking games anywhere is the engine.

Ehr, company's decisions are never the consumers fault. Make better games.

The games look nice but allegedly it was ass to work with.

Oh I believe it. I played the PC ports. Even my 4080 couldn't do those games "well".

But the best and most popular ones were turn based

2 PC port is arguably even worse. Though there's a patch available to mostly fix it. LR port is pretty good.
The new areas in 2 are pretty cool, but like 80% of the game is reused areas from the first game.
LR has decent areas and is notable for being the first real open world FF game. The game is noticeably lower budget than the previous two though.

youtube.com/watch?v=47YPs-qwNQU

FF13 has never recovered from this

I remember back when JonTron was based...

2 PC port is arguably even worse.

That port IS worse. I launched the game and had to deal with an insufferable audio bug. Checked online and read that the port had a slew of issues, including some from the original XIII. Honestly I was in the mood to play that one but I don't feel like looking for a bunch of patches to fix the game atm. FF13fix pretty much did the job for the first one, but 2 has even more issues to deal with apparently and I'm not sure if one patch would fix it.

being nearly 100% reused assets and not being anywhere near as good as FFX

idk dawg I'd class that as bad

Thankfully most people don't judge a game on one aspect

'Bad' is a stretch, it's definitely mediocre though. Like I said, the Garment Grid was cool and there was something like 2 dozen jobs you could try. The fact that they pushed it out in like a year and it wasn't 'full price' probably made me more positively disposed towards it too.

Not when there are so many OTHER bad aspects you can judge it on, no.

I had contrarian retards trying to say FF 12 was good

now zoomers are trying to say 13, the definitive moment of massive decline, is good

in a few years they'll be saying 15 and 16 are good

What’s wrong with 12?

single-player MMO with FF13-tier characters and shit plot

I always had a fondness for 12.

had a great writer and squandered it on a shitty Star Wars rehash with a garbage observer main character to the REAL MC, which was Ashe. Doesn't feel like FF, tried to revisit Ivalice from the Tactics games, doesn't feel like Tactics either.
Was despised when it came out despite what the revisionist history zoomers want to tell you with only shitholes like IGN saying it was good.

The fanbase had a very muted reaction to it and thus began the slide into muted reactions with FF 13 being the moment many people checked out of the series.

this
it's only good in context of how bad modern ff is

XIII-2's port is so broken without fan patches that it ought to be illegal to sell it.

All I'm willing to admit is that Vanille is the hottest Final Fantasy girl of all time

By far the worst character ever introduced in an FF game. Her voice actress somehow found a way to sound like she was deaf and retarded at the same time.

Remaking FF7 was the best decision they made, but they fucked it up by making it a weird metasequel that's aimed at autistic fanboys who are teenagers yet old enough to play the original when it came out

Yeah her dub VA was awful but her design is peak sex.

I played this like a week ago, i had fun with the Pulse quests but i can't do the Oerba stone no matter how hard i try, guess i'll just finish the game and come back latter, so far the game is alright, a bit melodramatic and too many cutscenes but other than that i had fun with it

37 here. The reaction was overblown just like everything else on this website. FFX-2 was just a cozy, quirky, light-hearted sequel to a game which had a rather grim setting.

Aranea is superior in every way

I remember playing X-2 for the first time and the intro was playing, my brother poked his head in my room to see what game I was playing. He took one look at the screen, then looked me dead in the eyes and and said 'heh FAG!.'

and you said "heh, less gay than staring at a man's ass all day" right

My biggest problem with X2 was just that it was boring. So many of the quests involved sloppy minigames and I didn't enjoy a single one of them.

I never played 13, but I refuse to believe this can be worse than 15. Especially when I played 15 the week of release.

sweetie

kys

X-2 wasn't hated or beloved at the time it came out. I remember most of the conversations around it being pissed that shit was hidden in the game in such a way it felt like they were trying to force you to buy the Prima guides

sleep in this bed in this inn at this time or you can't get the Teedus ending lmao ;)

You can actually lose in FFXIII if you play like shit which makes it better than XV by default

It wasn't liked, because it was way way too easy to ruin your save and not hit 100% for the 'true' ending.

Play it for yourself and find out.

I would but I don't think it's a good game so I don't really want to play it and if it is somehow worse then it would be a waste of time. It's like a lose/lose situation to me.

fpbp

It's worse than 15 despite 13 being a completed game.