Squeenix Final Fantasy 15

[felipepepe]

Still haven't played XIII, a friend told me it's very linear until the end but that the combat is pretty fun, but I really enjoyed XII. XII was the best Final Fantasy game I've played.

You can safely skip to FF XIII-2, is waaaay better, non-linear and with more nuances to the combat system.

 

[Nugs]

Avoid XIII like tha plague, FF was dead to me after FF X

 

[felipepepe]

Avoid XIII like tha plague, FF was dead to me after FF X

Then you missed a lot of fun with XII's combat.

 

[Nugs]

Thanks but pseudo real time combat does not interest me, after turn based for ages it was like a slap to the face of fans, thankfuly XV will copy the KH combat which is decent and not that horrible travesty from XII or XIII. Guess Squeenix learned its lesson when money started to sink.

I still hate you squeenix because it will not be turn based, give back old square soft you thieves.

 

[spekkio]

pseudo real time combat does not interest me, after turn based for ages

 

[Athelas]

Weren't they always pseudo-realtime? Enemies would still attack while you were making your turn. Pretty terrible combat system, actually - one that punishes you using strategy.

 

[Delterius]

Because Strategy is something you are supposed create on the fly.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Well Squeenix is in deep shit financially.

Citation needed

This is a few months old but square enix has made some bone headed decisions in the past. Especially related to FF14, which isn't exactly a secret.

Here is from Nov. http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/5/50...cial-forecast-due-to-final-fantasy-14-a-realm

Not many companies can survive the spectacular failure of a AAA MMO release that never made a single penny (or very few pennies?)

I also guess their CEO had to resign and they've been doing layoffs. That was from a google search that took all of two seconds. Not sure how the company is performing in the "now" but most companies do better after layoffs so their stock might be "up" but I doubt it means they are doing well. They don't make good games and they will eventually try to release another AAA MMO and the company will go bankrupt.

I wonder who square enix's creditors are and who would eventually end up with the Final Fantasy series should square enix go bankrupt. It might be interesting if it went to bioware.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Weren't they always pseudo-realtime? Enemies would still attack while you were making your turn. Pretty terrible combat system, actually - one that punishes you using strategy.

It's been like that since FF4. Square calls it ATB (Active Time Battle), which doesn't really mean anything but japs gonna jap.

It punishes you for spending ages uuuuuhming and aaaaaaaahming at the list of possible actions, making combat more tense and forcing you to come up with strategies faster. The first games had tense and strategic combat despite being plain turnbased, but that was because random encounters were brutal as fuck. The difficulty was toned down for subsequent games, so they had to come up with something to spice it up.

But those who hate it can usually disable it on the options, normally choosing between "WAIT" and "ACTIVE" mode. In wait mode, everyone will charge their action bar at the same time, and time freezes when someone is selecting/doing an action.

 

[Average Manatee]

Thanks but pseudo real time combat does not interest me, after turn based for ages it was like a slap to the face of fans, thankfuly XV will copy the KH combat which is decent and not that horrible travesty from XII or XIII. Guess Squeenix learned its lesson when money started to sink.

I still hate you squeenix because it will not be turn based, give back old square soft you thieves.

FFIV: ATB system
FFV: ATB system
FFVI: ATB system
FFVII:ATB system
FFIX: ATB system
FFX: TB system
FFX-2: ATB system
FFXII: ATB system
FFXIII: ATB system

wut?

 

[Athelas]

Weren't they always pseudo-realtime? Enemies would still attack while you were making your turn. Pretty terrible combat system, actually - one that punishes you using strategy.

It's been like that since FF4.

It punishes you for spending ages uuuuuhming and aaaaaaaahming at the list of possible actions, making combat more tense and forcing you to come up with strategies faster.

No, it punishes you when you want to use a spell or item and have to scroll down a long list to select it. It's an incredibly stupid concept. Not that the games were ever hard enough for this to pose a burden.

The first games had tense and strategic combat despite being plain turnbased, but that was because random encounters were brutal as fuck. The difficulty was toned down for subsequent games, so they had to come up with something to spice it up.

I recall them being pretty easy. Generally speaking, a turn-based system can't really be strategic when it lacks such basic elements like movement or an action point system.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Pretty easy to get a total party wipe, you mean. Unless you grinded, you were never sure you could complete a dungeon on your first try (from FF4 onwards that's a foregone conclusion, especially since they're way more generous about saving the game)

 

[Damned Registrations]

But those who hate it can usually disable it on the options, normally choosing between "WAIT" and "ACTIVE" mode. In wait mode, everyone will charge their action bar at the same time, and time freezes when someone is selecting/doing an action.

Even then, there are still fucked up properties of the ATB system in battles. I noticed it most heavily in FF9 (in fact I think there's a strategy for beating an optional boss that revolves around abusing it) and basically, you can use really long animations to render the difference in speed between characters irrelevant, because the bars keep filling during the animations, but characters can't act simultaneously. So during a single spell, your entire party fills their bars and gets to move again, while hyperspeed boss only gets one attack even though he's supposed to be much faster.

And yeah, FF1 was brutal unless you had some sort of megacheese party and grinded your ass off for gear. I haven't played a lot of 2 and 3, but they didn't seem a whole lot more forgiving. Most jrpgs didn't start getting easy until the mid 90's.

 

[Niektory]

Even then, there are still fucked up properties of the ATB system in battles. I noticed it most heavily in FF9 (in fact I think there's a strategy for beating an optional boss that revolves around abusing it) and basically, you can use really long animations to render the difference in speed between characters irrelevant, because the bars keep filling during the animations, but characters can't act simultaneously. So during a single spell, your entire party fills their bars and gets to move again, while hyperspeed boss only gets one attack even though he's supposed to be much faster.

Yeah, ATB was really bad. There's little point of having the bars at all when a lot of the time they sit at 100% and the characters twiddle their thumbs waiting for the animations to finish. It would work if the bars paused during the animations, or if several attacks could be executed at once (like in FF12), but as it was implemented it was just horrible.

 

[ghostdog]

FFX had the best combat system. Real turn based combat, swapping of charactersa and many weaknesses/resistances that forced you to think a bit. Too bad the leveling system was crap, the story tottaly idiotic (even for a FF game), the progression painfully linear and the majority of characters mind-crushingly annoying (even for a FF game).

 

[Average Manatee]

Swapping characters was kind of OP in FFX since it cost you absolutely no time to do so. And altogether it's one of the easiest FFs, so the turn based combat system is wasted when there are so many ways to make it trivial. FFXII IZJS has the best whole package IMO.

 

[Siveon]

Might turn out to be a decent ARPG. Story is probably crap, though.

Not a Day 1 purchase, but for 10-30 bucks I'll give it a go, if I ever decide to buy a next gen console.

 

[Azrael the cat]

And the whole "we are advanced while you're medieval cause you focused on war" is extremely retarded. Focusing on machines and war turns you into a industrial society, not holds you on medieval times.

Somewhat. It's a really difficult thing to draw consistent conclusions from historically. Warfare has certainly encouraged innovation/invention that then has domestic/industrial uses - it's a classic case of 'need' driving inspiration (other needs have worked in the opposite direction - need for transport/energy leading to military advances, need for stone tools leading to early weapon-crafting). But there's also the counterpoint that civil war has never been a recipe for national prosperity or cultural advancement (US drone technology will soon have domestic/industrial uses, but do you think that the US would benefit from a 3-way civil war stretched over the next hundred years?). If your whole region turns into a shit-fight, you lack the security and economic incentives for advancement (being the first nation to develop firearms for mass military use isn't going to help you if your spanking new gun-bearing nation is going to split into 4 warring factions).

Very tentatively, and with lots of counterexamples, your best bet is to have a series of small scale wars with your neighbours, where there's no rapid threat to any side's overall security and economy, and no chance of anyone becoming too dominant and taking it to anything more than a series of border skirmishes (even if you're the winner, you won't benefit longterm from sewing all your potential trading partners' and industrial competitors' fields with salt) - combined with a homefront that is very stable militarily, but heavily contested politically and economically. Civil wars tend to wreck the whole country as there's no secure, fenced off home economy that's safe from becoming a warzone, plus too much of the economy becomes devoted to military leading to famines and political collapses.

 

[Vagiel]

I don't get what they are thinking with 14. Release a failed mmo and then reboot it and release it again with the same name... I mean come on no one while ever know the difference unless they spend huuuge money on ads and I still doubt it. FF is mostly known for being offline thing. Make a nice offline rpg, build audience and then expand it to online and you might have a chance.

And to all who say that FF has been irrelevant since X or XII. It's been one mainline game since then so it doesn't say too much.

 

[eric__s]

Final Fantasy 11 is the most profitable thing Square-Enix has ever made. The game is 12 years old and people are still paying for it every month. It's had five or six expansions, the most recent of which came out months ago. Final Fantasy 14 didn't pan out like they wanted it to, so they revamped it in an effort to get more people to play it, which has sort of worked. It was expensive, but it was an investment that they hope pans out over the course of the next decade like it has with Final Fantasy 11.

 

[Vagiel]

I didn't know it picked up steam. Good for them I guess. Anyway I still would like a single player game that would expand to multi after the end. Pleasing both crowds in the end like.

 

[J1M]

I wish these fags would stop pretending that they make games and release anime DVDs @ $50 each instead.

 

[Echo Mirage]

The last time they tried something like that, Enix had to buy them out.

 

[Martius]

The last time they tried something like that, Enix had to buy them out.

You mean Spirit Within? On the other hand Advent Children preformed better if I remember correctly. I guess they just have to make movies based FF games which people like.

 

[Xor]

Looks absolutely nothing like a Final Fantasy game.