This is something I don't get. FF1 was really simple in plot, characters, and "lore". It did well. 10 years later, except for the battle system, the franchise is completely unrecognizable. What I want to know is what did people who played 1 thought about the fact that final fantasy changed radically. Did they care? Maybe they stopped playing videogames by then.
It was a step by step gradual evolution
This and I think the devs kept wanting to push for more. More story, more graphics, more better.
literally no one wanted the games to stay that primitive
So why did they play them to begin with?
People sometimes had like three games. Maybe four.
And if you played a lot, you're eventually have played almost all things that existed.
everything you describe as simple was not simple in 1987. This is the peak of console RPG technology for the time. When the technology evolved the games evolved with them and gamers got to experience the progression and see what was capable in a game.
dude you couldnt even see if armor was better than what you had before buying it. the game is full of annoyances that only existed because they had to start somewhere and release something before they could make improvements
All of the “bugs” or issues people have with FF1 is solely because the actual programmer, Nasir Gebelli, was an Iranian-American who somehow ended up in Japan and could not speak a word of Japanese. He also had no clue as to what an RPG actually was. These issues were cleaned up with FF2 and FF3. Not sure if he worked on 4 or not, but I believe he helped dev Secret of Mana
Meme opinion. There are only 2 reasons Square made it big: Sakaguchi and Nasir, and both go hand in hand.
During the making of Final Fantasy II, Nasir's work visa expired. They didn't hire a new programmer. They delocalized the entire dev team to California. For Final Fantasy III they used his name and picture front & center for advertisement.
How is it a meme opinion, you fricking moron. Nasir was not interested in RPGs. Sakaguchi had to explain to him what hit points were because Nasir could not fathom why a player would die when their HP would reach 0.
Let’s see you go to Japan and code a game in a genre you know nothing about and not being able to speak the language. Of course bugs will happen
concepts copied from the west in the first place, if they knew how to do all this why did they hire nasir in the first, if they knew how to do it why did they move shop to California to make the second game?
His visa expired so they had to follow him to California.
>second game
Third game
I get the, interface wise games improved. They also were made easier so more people could get into them. Still doesn't explain the change in the themes present in these games. Would someone playing one day pokemon be happy if eventually they are based in prehistoric times? How the characters are pictured, the nature of the quest, the dialogues, everything is so different. Did people just forget about how things used to be?
it was the style at the time
FF1 had the deepest lore. Did you play the same game I did?
>Foretold heroes from prophecy
>Time Traveling
>Advanced futuristic-ancient society
Shit was amazing. Also Famicom FF2 had a deep story
Dragon Quest sort of stayed simple for the most part and that's what I love about it
We thought it was kino
they kept it simple for the jap gamer who couldnt think beyond movement and a button for action, they had to bring an american in to make the game for them since their brains were not able to comprehend creating an rpg.
I played the three US-released FF games on NES and SNES as a kid. I adored them all. The first one felt like an amazingly vibrant and rich expansion of the concept of Dragon Warrior (which I had also loved). The second one blew my mind with its far more detailed story. The third one was like the second but with more freedom and much more polish. At no point in this progression did I feel any sense of loss or perceive any major flaw in any of these games.
When FF7 came out I was too old to accept it that generously, so I probably wouldn't have loved it if I had played it (which I didn't because my family only had Nintendo consoles and I'd mainly moved over to PC gaming at that point). Also, the crude 3D graphics would have disappointed me.
Today, I have trouble enjoying any JRPG (although I still can sometimes) because of how extremely easy these games tend to be. I don't mind having a very simple story and I don't mind having a very complex story. What I mind is having a shallow mechanical challenge. If the game gives me 100 interesting-looking spells and then never requires me to explore the use of more than half a dozen of them (heal, revive, direct damage, and probably a few miscellaneous utility spells that happen to do awesome things), then I'm deeply disappointed. Obviously I'm deeply disappointed quite often, with this genre. But yeah I don't need a simple story or a complex story. Just as long as there's any story and it isn't total garbage and doesn't give rise to too many non-interactive cutscenes or frustratingly slow line readings by voice actors.
>The first one felt like an amazingly vibrant and rich expansion of the concept of Dragon Warrior (which I had also loved). The second one blew my mind with its far more detailed story. The third one was like the second but with more freedom and much more polish. At no point in this progression did I feel any sense of loss or perceive any major flaw in any of these games.
But there was a shift in how the world is portrayed, the characters etc. Clearly, the way characters were designed in 4 onward are more similar than anything in 1/3. Did you feel like it was hard to go back to 1 after playing the snes games?
If I were into, say, medieval illustrations, I might consider the merits of renaissance paintings but not necessary think they are better. More technical sure, but perhaps I enjoy the simplicity of the silly monk drawings. Likewise, I wonder if anyone actually thought making the games feel more like anime was a bad move or literally no one cared.
>Likewise, I wonder if anyone actually thought making the games feel more like anime was a bad move or literally no one cared.
Back then the concept of anime was barely known. Most people didn't know or recognize which cartoons came from Japan vs America vs Europe, it was all much more fuzzy and unknown. Generally if someone did know something like say Robotech was from overseas they called it Japanimation more likely than not. And to all those who knew these games were from Japan (very few for FF1, some for FF2/4 and many for FF3) it was seen as a positive. Especially by the time FF3/6 came out there was a very large Japanese subculture starting to build.
>Did you feel like it was hard to go back to 1 after playing the snes games?
I wouldn't have used the word "hard", but yeah I generally didn't want to go backward in the series. That wasn't mainly because of story-related aspects of the games though. The series developed in lots of other ways too. The older graphics feel more primitive, the mechanics are simpler... and on top of all that, there's the simple fact that once you've played through one of these games once or twice, you probably won't need to see it again for a long while. Or at least that's how it was for me. I mean why do the same thing repeatedly? Changing your party compositions in those three games doesn't really change the experience much. (Maybe it's different in FFV; I wouldn't know.) I played each game until I'd had my fill, and then I waited for the next one.
For me, the change you're talking about just didn't need to be consciously noticed or reacted to. I was a kid and I just wanted to be blown away by a big mess of superficially cool fantasy-type stuff with a Dragon Warrior-ish game engine in the middle of it. I wasn't great at analyzing stories or processing detailed lore and I wasn't in a position to potentially be bothered by the presence or absence of same. I think it's probably true that as the games added more and more story scenes, I learned to expect that stuff, and so I might well have been disappointed if it had suddenly disappeared from the series, even if other aspects of the games were greatly improved at the same time. I just felt like cool things were being added, and I liked it, and that was the extent of my thinking on the matter.
If I were to play these games for the first time today, as an adult, I guess I'd probably be surprised by how different they are.
What about the best remake?
https://web.archive.org/web/20130921061149/http://www.1up.com/news/hironobu-sakaguchi-final-fantasy-roller-coaster
>except for the battle system
I am just dropping in to let people know that FF1 and DQ3 came out within months of each other and DQ3 is 100x better.
Yeah it's crazy how all of the big JRPG names came out during the same time (FF, MegaTen, Phantasy Star) just to be assraped by DQ3 a few months later
One minute /vr/ complains that there has been no innovation in gaming since 2007, next minute they complain that Final Fantasy 1 on NES didn't get copypasted ad infinitum.
It’s almost like OP is always a homosexual. How have you not learned that already? It’s a fact that’s been known for 21 years already.
I played FF1 on NES when it was new and thought it was only okay, not amazing. I played FF Legend not knowing it was a different series and liked it better. I played FF2 not knowing it was 4 and thought it was solid but dull. I played FF3 not knowing it was 6 and thought it was fantastic. I played FF7 knowing the history of Final Fantasy and found it decent but over hyped. I played FF8 and found it good in some ways and horrible in others. I played FF9 and found it was a decent mix of old and new and in general pretty good.
That was enough Final Fantasy for me.
>That was enough Final Fantasy for me.
you quit at the right time. nothing from the PS2 to present is of any value
That's bewn my impression. Though I have been slightly tempted by 12 over the years, that's the only one. I'm pretty burnt out on Jrpgs in general. Etrian Odyssey scratches the itch and occasionally I replay something old but that's it.
I stuck with the games all the way until 10. Will admit, by that point I was already seeing the changes coming and wasn't too fond of it, but what I loved was still kind of there so I sucked it up and played. After 12 dropped I gave up on the franchise and haven't touched it since.