The results of a recent Final Fantasy popularity poll, held in honor of the franchise's 35th anniversary, were being passed around the Internet recently, with most discussion homing in on FFX's Wakka ranking as voters' second-favorite character. The poll, conducted by Japanese streaming service NicoNico, with a small sample size and clearly influenced by memes of the moment, was no more authoritative than any of the numerous other surveys routinely run by gaming publications and fan forums. But it did remind me that my personal rankings have not been updated in over 12 years, during which time I have played a few newer entries, while some of my feelings on older ones may have changed or evolved. I've also decided to do away with separate lists for "story" vs. "systems," acknowledging that one cannot practically separate the experience of the one from the other. Which brings us now to my 2022 edition of "Omega Warzard's Definitive Ranking of Numbered Final Fantasy Games":
IV
Final Fantasy IV is always the one I hold up as the ideal entry point into the series. This is because it exemplifies the qualities I personally have most enjoyed in any Final Fantasy: a well-paced narrative, a dramatic story, and battles that challenge me just enough to give me pride in my victory. The last time I did a ranking, I considered IV's story dated. It is not deep, but neither do more recent Final Fantasy games feel written for adult audiences, and the layers of convoluted nonsense they have added instead have actually helped IV age better by comparison. The gameplay, at first glance, might also seem the simplest in the series—it's the only Final Fantasy with almost no party customization options—but the satisfaction comes not in augmenting your units into godlike killing machines, but in puzzling out how best to play the hand you've been dealt to overcome the most thoughtfully designed boss battles.
IX
While earlier games tried to push things forward, IX's combat deliberately regressed to a simpler form of the ATB system, and in that aspect felt more dated than all the older games. The frequency of the fighting made the journey a bit of a slog, so if you play one of the more modern ports that offers boosters to trivialize or even bypass battles, don't feel too proud to take advantage. Because the rest of the experience is essential—from beginning to end, one of the cleverest and most consistently compelling stories and most lovable casts of characters in any video game. Perhaps the only other negative about the experience is that, because the quality of the writing is so high, you'll feel obligated to play with a guide at all times, for fear of missing out on anything.
VII
VII is a lot closer to the earliest games in the series, both by release date now and in the feel of its gameplay loop, than it is to XIV or XV, or to other modern RPGs. In its own time, both convention and comfort abounded in exploring its dungeons, flying across its overworld, and cutting down foes via its menu-based combat. Yet its world felt like something truly new and original, boldly ambitious in its art direction and subject matter. The story was not merely escapist fantasy, but treated games as a legitimate medium for its creators to earnestly express philosophy and spirituality, albeit it also opened the door to, and itself set one foot in, the pseudophilosophical nonsense that would later pervade and all but sink the JRPG genre.
VIII
It's less an opinion than a matter of historical fact now that VIII's torpid narrative was the biggest stumble in the series up to that point. In contrast, its fast-flowing combat, accentuating almost every onscreen action with a timed button press, was the ultimate expression of the ATB system (at least perhaps until FFX-2, which I've never played and which doesn't count). And the journey did wrap up a lot stronger than it began, with the most exhilarating final boss theme and then the most satisfying ending cinematic in the series.
VI
In hindsight, this was 2D Final Fantasy "Endgame"—the culmination of all that had come before. After IV, the series was the recognized leader in video games as a storytelling medium, and expectations were at a fever pitch for the next step forward. VI more than lived up, with a story that was bigger and writing by far more mature than its predecessors. At least, that's how I would have described the first half. The back half took a huge swing, quite literally wiping out everything that had worked so well up to that point, and it remains, to my mind, one of the great unfulfilled promises in gaming.
XIV
This is a hard one to rank, since it continues to grow and evolve, with each major expansion almost but not quite a full story unto itself. The current base game, A Realm Reborn, is tedious and uneventful, and would probably rank closer to the bottom of this list. Heavensward (which is as far as I've played) is what earns XIV its place here. It offers possibly the weightiest climax of any Final Fantasy, though it cannot be properly appreciated in a vacuum apart from A Realm Reborn.
I
Dated, certainly, but still elegant in its simplicity, largely because the original classes were so well and purely defined. No subsequent tank or DPS classes or characters have so wholly embodied their roles as the original warrior and monk respectively. It's fun even just to theorycraft about how different party compositions can be made to work in this game. And if it is perhaps a tad grindy, well, it probably still takes less time to get through than every other entry on this list.
V
The job system was certainly more robust than ever, and there was great satisfaction to be found in mixing abilities from different classes to yield lethal combinations. But quite a lot of jobs were quite frankly redundant—too much the same as or worse than other jobs. The bloat makes it less accessible than I, and the story, while passable, is fairly generic JRPG, lightyears behind its immediate predecessor's diverse cast of heroes and antiheroes.
X
The introduction of voice-acted and motion-captured cutscenes was both thrilling and jarring, as Tidus and friends presented as more starkly cartoonish than, ironically, the super-deformed characters I had grown up with. But the story still delivered some signature emotional highs, bolstered by composer Nobuo Uematsu's last major contributions to the series. The battle system was immaculately tuned and strategic, to the point of being exhausting.
XV
Grand and effectively moody but nonsensical in its plot. The systems and mechanics were too numerous and complex for how unrewarding it felt to ever stray from the main road.
II
Some later remakes/remasters made the notoriously unbalanced leveling system a lot less grindy. Freed of its punishing aspects, it becomes a serviceable JRPG of its age, with a just compelling enough story, though nothing to warrant a detour but for series completionists.
III
I played about 20 percent of the 3D remake before hitting a wall. It had some charm, but ultimately felt like a bitter intermediate stage between I and V—less elegant than the former, less flexible than the latter.
XII
I only sampled a small portion and found it grueling. I do know the characters and story, though not with fondness.
XIII
I have not played this yet, nor am I very familiar with the characters or story. What I gleaned of it via Final Fantasy Record Keeper seemed senseless and convoluted.
As the world burns, I am playing Final Fantasy XIV.
Indeed, for the better part of the year 2020, I played the Square Enix MMORPG—my first MMORPG ever!—almost to the exclusion of all other leisure, the unplanned consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic shutting everything down. My adventure actually began a little before that, however, with a more earnest interest.
When my online Final Fantasy game of choice, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, started including characters from FFXIV, they were strangers to me and most of my fellow nostalgia-baited FFRK players. But the handful of Redditors that existed in the overlap between the two games’ audiences were more than happy to explain at length what Y’shtola and Thancred’s stories were, and invariably they would expound further into full-on impassioned discourses arguing why FFXIV, supposedly every bit as engrossing a story-driven adventure as the favored classics represented in FFRK, was a must-play entry for all longtime series fans. Best of all, most of it could be experienced single-player!
Having now completed A Realm Reborn (essentially, “Book 1” of FFXIV, not including an earlier version of the game that failed and was shut down) I can say that this MMORPG has so far indeed been a story-driven experience, in the sense that there is a single linear “main scenario” that makes up the bulk of activity in the game (at least until you start shooting for the endgame, which would likely take a non-hardcore player years to reach and also would not be of interest to them anyway). The A Realm Reborn portion of the story is roughly the length of a standard Final Fantasy: about 50 hours for me, though that included a few hours of side quests (most of which I undertook accidentally while figuring out how to differentiate side quests from main quests), some errant wandering, and some “away from keyboard” time (when I would take a mid-session break but leave the game running in the background). And as with any good Final Fantasy of the last three decades, you can proceed almost straight through without any grinding (though you may have to do 2-3 non-story dungeons, along with one set of class and job quests, which are worth doing anyway).
The active experience of the main scenario, however, bears only superficial resemblance to the single-player Final Fantasy classics. Series veterans longing for a return to the 16-bit glory days may welcome the high fantasy trappings and crystal motifs, but otherwise FFXIV satisfies no better than anything else post-FFXIII in bringing us home. Pitting it against FFXV specifically (since that was the last Final Fantasy I played), the two differ widely but ultimately trade blows about evenly. A Realm Reborn’s plot is far more comprehensible, which is not to say that it’s straightforward—there are myriad nations and deities to keep track of—but if it ever becomes hard to grasp, it is from the game saying too much rather than too little. The former means I sometimes get names mixed up (e.g. which member of the imperial royal family is which, when none of them have yet appeared on camera). The latter results in me not having any idea how or why Noctis in FFXV arrived at any given moment, nor what the meaning of his next plan is, such as there is one. So FFXIV looks and sounds more like my traditional conception of what a Final Fantasy should be.
Where A Realm Reborn falls short of expectations for the series is in the drama of the narrative. There is almost no rising action through the entire main scenario. This is why it was so hard initially for me to distinguish the side quests from the main quests: the actions of both felt similarly humdrum and inconsequential. More often than not, even the main quests would simply entail trekking back and forth between the same couple civilized zones within a bland overworld to fetch and/or deliver some MacGuffin. Sometimes the characters sending me on these errands would even acknowledge the tediousness of the tasks, which only aggravated me more. If you know your system is badly designed, then don’t just shrug and perpetuate it. Do better!
I kept waiting for my heroic journey to begin in earnest, and there were many false starts—a new character making a grand entrance, or a lengthy cutscene containing some bold speechifying—when I would get excited that events were about to be set in motion, only to be treated to yet another fetch quest. The characters and their speeches almost never amount to anything. To those Redditors who tried to sell me on how awesome Y’shtola and Thancred are, I say it would have been more accurate to sum them up thusly: “These are nobodies.” They barely rate as supporting characters, as their appearances are so brief and sporadic, their contributions to any action or dialogue so trivial. The only consistently significant narrative agents are Minfilia and Alphinaud, supervisory characters who exist to tell you what to do, since the player character does not have a voice to call their own shots. The choice to feature a silent and solitary protagonist is typical of MMORPGs, though fans of the SNES and PS1-era Final Fantasy games may find it a harsh break from the developed leads and party dynamics traditionally associated with the series.
Potentially more interesting than the main scenario are the class quests, depending on what class you select when creating your character. Technically optional, but required if you want to unlock core skills and abilities for your class, these are short stories that you can intermittently progress through alongside the main scenario. Perhaps because they are smaller in scope, they feel a little more intimate. By the time I completed the class quests for my gladiator character, I knew the supporting characters in that story a lot better than I ever got to know Y’shtola and Thancred through all of A Realm Reborn.
I think the narrative is further constrained by the persistent nature of the MMORPG world. Since it must be shared among many players who are at different stages of the story, nothing ever seems to change in it, which further undermines any sense of stakes beyond your immediate skirmish. By contrast, one aspect in which FFXV lived up to the Final Fantasy standard was in the grandeur of its set pieces. Looming threats turned to cataclysmic clashes that sometimes permanently altered the landscape. You could feel the end approaching through the darkening of the world, both figurative and literal. The only moments in A Realm Reborn that come close to that epic quality are the very final battles, which also happen to be among the worst moments, because the requirement that you experience them alongside other players creates a situation where randos end up photobombing all over your climax.
Yes, most of A Realm Reborn can be experienced single-player. Since quests are assigned to individuals and not groups, there is in fact almost no way to even try to work with others to clear the fetch quests together. For most of the main scenario, the other players are just passing through the background of your story, running their own errands or waging their own battles on the overworld. It does break the spell a bit when you’re trying to get through a quest dialogue, and then some dude playing weaver class decides to set down their spinning wheel right behind you to crank out a couple robes. But the fantasy was not that immersive to begin with. The real bubble-burster, for those weaned on the antisocial adventures of Cloud and Squall, and already leery of Final Fantasy going multiplayer, is when it comes time to tackle the dungeons, where players are required to party up with one another.
Most dungeons in A Realm Reborn are just long caves full of monsters, with a big boss monster at the end. There is no in-game explanation for why you must join forces with other players, only contrived reasons for why Y’shtola and Thancred can’t back you up instead. If your own mute hero is a practical nonentity, the other player characters might as well not exist at all, as far as the story is concerned. Only the most passing mentions are ever made to “your allies,” but nothing is ever said of where they come from or why they are as strong as you, despite your being a supposedly uniquely powerful warrior touched by the gods. So as a baseline, the narrative in most dungeons is thin. From there, points can only be deducted from the experience according to the degree to which the other players disrupt it.
Truly malicious behavior (e.g. bullying, offensive talk, deliberately sabotaging the group effort, etc.) is not something I have ever personally encountered in FFXIV. The more innocent kind of disruption is when some members of the party simply don’t perform well. They struggle to keep up with a boss, resulting in the entire group dying and having to restart. Sometimes it happens repeatedly, until the flailing player or another member so loses faith in the effort that they quit out, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch. I can’t entirely blame them.
The main scenario is generally well balanced for a more casual level of player, meaning that most battles can be successfully completed on the first try without ever having to grind for levels or even buy any items or equipment. Losses are almost never due to being underpowered, but rather from being underinformed about the mechanics of a boss’s gimmicks. Even in routine dungeon battles, the amount of briskly updating information to keep track of is absurd to me: health, positions, buffs and debuffs of all allies and enemies; timers telling me when each of my abilities is ready to reuse; who or where enemies are targeting (as marked by glowy shapes on the ground). Bosses add further mechanics that you might be seeing for the first time up to that point. There might be objects you have to interact with. Enemy attacks might be telegraphed through obscure text or subtle animations instead of the usual glowy shapes. When glowy shapes do appear, they might mean something different from what you’re used to them meaning. In one fight, a circle signified refuge. In the very next fight, a similar-looking circle was something to steer clear of—unless you were a tank, that is. And these things can change in the middle of a boss fight, so you have to be ready to adjust and adapt.
This can all quickly become overwhelming if it’s your first time attempting a given dungeon. Some gimmicks I’m convinced are impossible to grasp without having already experienced them once before, and I think that’s intentional to contrive comradeship through knowledge-sharing. The first players to figure out these dungeons can perhaps be thought of as pioneers, and then when they repeat them, they can share their wisdom with any newcomers in the group, and maybe the knowledge continues to get passed down that way. That’s fine in theory, but the strangers I group up with almost never give me any warning about what to expect.
When playing with strangers, I find that almost nobody ever talks, period. I get it, because I don’t talk either. It’s not what I play Final Fantasy for. But sometimes the failure to communicate is not a matter of being asocial. The worst players I’ve grouped with have been the veterans playing a dungeon for the umpteenth time, who would gladly disregard your presence, as they try to rush through as quickly as they can. The final dungeons of A Realm Reborn have been fairly ruined by the mentality of these players speeding through without giving first-timers the chance to really savor the climactic battles. (The battles probably also need to be rebalanced at some point, as the bosses are too weak now even for casual playthroughs.) But this is a problem that the designers created, and it shouldn’t be the players’ responsibility to sort it out on their own. This is also a problem, mind you, that simply doesn’t exist in the single-player Final Fantasy games I favor.
The multiplayer experience I’ve described is of playing in “pick-up groups” with strangers, since that’s nearly the only option when on the free trial. If you can manage to group with friends or family members, then the experience is certainly different. The pressure to keep pace with strangers’ unspoken expectations falls away, as does the diplomatic cautiousness of whether to give advice to someone who hasn’t asked for help but needs it. What’s left is a decent cooperative game that reminds me a little of the joys of questing with my siblings back in the day in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Dragon Quest IX, albeit without the full immersive context of being able to do anything together other than fight. At least the complexities of the combat actually become a boon, as they make for a less monotonous experience than those games.
At its best then, what FFXIV offers is something completely different from what I would traditionally seek from a Final Fantasy game, but it can be fun, if treated as a cooperative experience with friends. The fetch quest material in between each dungeon, at least in A Realm Reborn, is kind of a drag, but I have heard that the story picks up quite a bit in the next installment, Heavensward. I’m not sure all of my issues—silent protagonist, thin supporting cast, rando photobombers—can ever be resolved within FFXIV's MMORPG framework, but I’ll stick with the free trial for a while longer, and perhaps report back in a year on my Heavensward experience.
It took me two years on-and-off (mostly off) to slog my way through the first five chapters of Final Fantasy XV, about a month of intermittent play to plow through the middle four, and only a single day to sprint through the last five. It’s a JRPG with a split personality, to a degree I haven’t encountered since Xenogears.
Many players bemoan the unrealized potential of the open world, which midway through the campaign becomes closed off and gives way to a rigidly linear experience. In the case of such a story-driven JRPG as Final Fantasy XV, I personally feel that leaving players to explore at their leisure undermines the alleged urgency and high stakes of the characters’ situation even during the earlier part of the game, and would make zero sense once things shift into high gear later. For me, Final Fantasy XV becomes much more interesting after it narrows its focus. This despite the story not being very good.
Following a one-line prophecy and an intense but absent-context flash-forward, Final Fantasy XV’s story begins with the protagonist prince and his party setting out to rendezvous with his fiancee, while the king prepares to host “guests from Niflheim.” The loading screen for Chapter 1 clarifies that this is a political marriage you’re off to, but then your car immediately breaks down, and you find yourself consequently steered toward a series of detours and quid pro quo errands for the bumpkins you meet on the road.
During those first 2-3 hours, the party’s tedious on-screen activities became so disconnected from the sparsely detailed plot that very quickly I lost sense of either—the former because I could hardly become invested in fetch quests, the latter because I never knew it to recognize it from easily overlooked bulletins and overheard conversations. Thus, when—SPOILER (but not really, since it’s the first significant event of the story)—you receive word that your home has fallen to Niflheim, your father slain, your bride-to-be gone into hiding, the very existence of this evil empire felt like news to me, so long had it been since I’d heard the name “Niflheim.” (And having not read the lore guide in the optional tutorial, I did not recall ever being informed in the first place that we were at war.) In the wake of these calamitous tidings, you are shortly invited to resume hunting marks and selling your services to the yokels who remain cluelessly unaffected by the geopolitical turmoil.
This is a game whose narrative is another casualty of the inexplicable and insufferable arms race toward inscrutability that has overtaken Square’s storytelling since the PS1 era. In the SNES days, getting the latest Final Fantasy was like receiving a stylish new pair of pants. Then Final Fantasy VII was like a pair of one of those "distressed" jeans. You scratch your head at the frayed ends and pre-ripped holes, but then you see staged photographs of some hot-yet-cool model showing you the “right” way to wear them, and maybe you’ll grant there is something to the look that works. Unfortunately, Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima decided that that “something” needed to become everything, and so by the Kingdom Hearts sequels, we were getting only bags of tatters, and paying full price for them.
Final Fantasy XV’s mess of a plot is not as wantonly opaque as Kingdom Hearts (insofar as the basic laws of its reality do not feel moment-to-moment fluid), and the manner in which it tells or doesn’t tell its story deserves less credit, because there's not even a sense of calculated elusiveness to its disjointedness. When pivotal events or major character deaths occur off-screen, or when proper nouns are mentioned for the first time yet treated as though they should be common knowledge, these don’t read as considered creative decisions. Instead, it just feels like, over the course of the aforementioned generations of escalation toward increasingly obscure storytelling, even the editors can’t keep straight anymore when the writing is being deliberately enigmatic, versus when they are simply forgetting to mention things because their blind spots have blotted out their vision.
Cynics might posit that the flimsiness of the story is because Final Fantasy XV was intended to be a multimedia product, and the main game’s many holes were intentional to force audiences to seek answers through the companion movie, anime webisodes, and post-release DLC, among other projects that never materialized. (And this is without even taking into account its complicated origin as "Final Fantasy Versus XIII" and attendant murky connection to the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology.) I watched the atrocious Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV movie, and while it helps a little to set the scene and clarify the roles of figures who are allegedly major to the plot yet scarcely appear in the game, mostly it is just more of what is wrong with Final Fantasy XV: underdeveloped characters, nonsensical lore, and action that suffers from a lack of properly discernible beats because the ceilings of these characters’ abilities are never elucidated.
A microcosmic example of the game’s fundamental storytelling inadequacies: At one point the party receives word that a minor character has died. Everyone acts devastated by the news, but my immediate reaction was “Who?” As if hearing me, the game then cut to a few sepia-toned flashes of the character from when they were introduced. But that flashback didn’t exist when the game launched. It was patched in later, precisely because players couldn’t remember who the hell this character was. And you know what? The addition ultimately doesn’t fix anything. Yes, I remembered now who this one-scene nobody was. But I still did not care!
That was the stages of me processing Final Fantasy XV’s story in a nutshell. First would come exasperated confusion: I have no idea what anybody is talking about. Why won’t they just explain who/what this is? Then in my foolishness, I would look up the extended lore on the wiki to try to find answers, only to arrive at hollow resignation: I now know what they were talking about, and yet it all still feels as meaningless as when I did not. When I eventually learned to skip straight to resignation, the experience became more enjoyable. Although the story never came together in a coherent (or competent) way, I found it worked on a primal level, becoming oddly compelling through its absurdly high stakes and relentless momentum during its later chapters.
Many of the details actually echo Final Fantasy XII—political marriages, imperial backstabbing, treating with gods, legends of hero kings—but that’s all dressing in Final Fantasy XV. Once the story finally picks up steam (around Chapter 9), all one really needs to know is that it's good guys against bad guys in a literal fight to save the world. The layers of nonsense over top of that never amount to anything meaningful, but the base level still has some draw, especially as few other games would even dream of going as big as Final Fantasy has and here does so again in depicting the end of everything. A major point of tension straining willing suspension of disbelief in Final Fantasy XV is how modern the world feels—cars, smartphones, consumer culture—while still maintaining a high degree of arcane religiosity, with oracles being the most discussed public figures of the day. But it does make for spectacles of fearsome grandeur, gods sundering cities, and a potent mood of bleakness, as things continually go from bad to worse, and civilization’s total collapse seems to take all of a few hours.
I haven’t discussed the gameplay of Final Fantasy XV at all yet, because that was never the appeal of a numbered Final Fantasy for me even in the heyday of the series, and now in my mid-thirties with limited gaming time, I can hardly feign interest in learning a whole new set of complex RPG mechanics. Stupidly, I’ll admit in retrospect, I even took as a point of pride that I was not going to try to learn to play Final Fantasy XV. I would instead just set it to the easiest difficulty and cruise through the main scenario. (Which did not really work out, by the way, because the only thing that makes “Easy” mode easy is the fact that, every time your party gets wiped out, Carbuncle will resurrect you for free, allowing you to die and die again as you chip away at enemies out of your league.) This I regret, because the game was actually kind of fun once I finally grasped some of the systems toward the end of my playthrough.
If I could offer my past self some advice, here are the pro-tips I wish I’d figured out much sooner:
There is no traditional white magic for your characters to learn, so get used to relying on other means of healing.
You don’t get money just for winning battles. Instead, you collect junk, and that junk can be sold for cash. Seriously, unless you sell that junk, you won’t have enough funds even to buy basic potions or pay to rest at inns.
If Noctis gets low on HP, you can warp to nearby ledges. While hanging from them, he’ll automatically heal at a fairly rapid rate.
The skill tree screen has multiple pages. On the “Recovery” page, each of Noctis’s allies can learn the “First Aid” ability. Additionally, Ignis can learn “Regroup” on the “Techniques” page and “Regenerate” on the “Teamwork” page. These abilities by themselves should suffice to get the party mostly self-sufficient with healing on Easy mode.
I won’t say exactly how long it took me to realize each of the above, but you can infer that, for a significant portion of the game, my potion stocks were stuck in the single digits, and I basically could never heal myself during combat. Once I learned these basics, Easy mode went from “getting resurrected three times by Carbuncle is about par for a boss fight” to “now I’m cruising.”
The very first screen that loads when you boot the game is the message "A Final Fantasy for Fans and First-Timers," a clear statement of the development team's intention to restore the brand to relevance after it fell so mightily the previous generation. Final Fantasy XV is the first numbered Final Fantasy I’ve beaten since 2001's Final Fantasy X, so I can see myself a bit in both demographics, and I don't feel it serves either. It recalls the classics only in its lack of subtlety, but between its narrative deficiencies and mechanical density it also doesn't feel like a game of modern sensibilities or mainstream accessibility. I still don't think I've fully processed that it's over. Part of that is me not comprehending what was happening at any given time—either the story or the combat—but I also feel some genuine mixed emotions. I can't say with confidence whether I ultimately liked it, but I won't deny that the second half was at the very least engaging. In keeping with the pattern of senselessness, I really don't know anymore what it means to be "A Final Fantasy," but I suppose Final Fantasy XV does just enough, albeit through terrible means, to live up to the name precisely by keeping the franchise identity hard to pin down.
I beat Final Fantasy XV, and all I have to show for it is this photo of a Tonberry going in on Gladiolus’s crotch.
After a decade spent in development, Final Fantasy XV is due for release finally in just over a month. Another new console Final Fantasy, World of Final Fantasy, will be arriving even sooner at the end of October. A little further off, the long-demanded Final Fantasy VII remake is at last going to be a thing too (maybe?). After some pretty fraught years when the series was clearly relegated to B-tier status, we may be coming upon a Final Fantasy renaissance. Or if Final Fantasy XV underperforms, this may be a last gasp for the series, the developer, and the JRPG genre.
Personally, I already know I won’t be playing Final Fantasy XV. I’ve watched the trailers with the Japanese male model protagonists, and the image they’re pushing with this game just has zero relevance to me.
By no means am I implying that I've outgrown the series. The truth is, I’ve been playing a ton of Final Fantasy lately. It just so happens that all of that gaming has been on mobile platforms, where I would say Final Fantasy truly is experiencing a renaissance.
Final Fantasy Record Keeper
I recently updated my blog post about Final Fantasy Record Keeper to better reflect how awesome the game has become. Read my full review or check out some of my videos for a better sense of how it works, but, in short, imagine one of those JRPG coliseums—one where you can team up all of your favorite Final Fantasy characters to take on classic battles from throughout the series. From the gameplay to the visuals to the music, it’s a veritable best-of edition of Final Fantasy, and, more than anything else bearing the name in the last decade, it has helped to remind me that, once upon a time, I loved this series. No, there isn’t much of a plot to Record Keeper, but, through the battles, longtime fans get to relive some of the best moments of past stories, which is probably better than having to slog through a new, terrible story.
I’ll add that right now is also a great time for newcomers to jump in. A recent update to the game made the gacha lottery mechanic far more generous. Now, any time you spend 50 mythril (or, alternatively, about $30) to enter the 11-item drawing, you are guaranteed to pull at least one 5-star relic. Furthermore, there is currently a beginner-themed banner offering enhanced odds to pull the most useful weapons in the game, and, on top of that, you get to select an extra 5-star armor to go with your 11 other items. This means that, for the price of 50 mythril (which can be earned in about a week or less), you’re guaranteed to receive at least two 5-star items, with a pretty good chance that one of them will be among the best in the game. The game now even starts you off with one 5-star item completely free. When I started playing, it took me about a month to obtain my first 5-star, a Danjuro dagger from FFXII, which carried me a long while after. If you were to start now, you could pretty quickly have an entire party armed with 5-star gear and be able to tear through the early-game content.
Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius
Pretty much everything Final Fantasy Record Keeper gets right, Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius gets wrong. My understanding is that Brave Exvius is essentially a Final Fantasy-themed re-skin of developer A-Lim’s hit free-to-play mobile RPG, Brave Frontier, and its origins in that unrelated franchise may explain why it doesn’t feel very much like Final Fantasy.
Like Record Keeper, the big draw of Brave Exvius is its inclusion of a ton of Final Fantasy characters to collect and rotate into your party. The difference is that, in Brave Exvius, you can only obtain these characters via the gacha lottery, and the odds of pulling your favorite are slim. Brave Exvius further dilutes the pool by including a bunch of characters that would not be on anyone’s radar. Maybe some fans will be mildly pleased to finally play as Giott from FFIV or Lani from FFIX (though probably not after you’ve pulled your third useless Giott). But the lower ranks are populated primarily by generic “original” characters created just for this game. Unless you have a ton of real money to burn to bypass the odds, chances are you’ll be spending weeks, if not months, playing with a garbage party of no-name commoners before you finally win any of the famed heroes of Final Fantasy lore. Before long, you’ll wonder why this game even bears the Final Fantasy name, except to tease you.
Even once you acquire some name characters, the actual experience of playing with them is disappointing. In Brave Exvius, the weak characters (which includes most of the name characters) are hopeless and interchangeably so, because what they all have in common is that they can’t use the few key abilities that make the strong characters good. And the strong characters still are not fun to use, because these good abilities are merely better versions of the numerous crap abilities in the game. Basically, you just hope you get a strong character (which may not be a character you otherwise like), and then you use the same ability over and over again. Everything else is a waste of space. The battle system itself is turn-based, not taken from any previous Final Fantasy, but simplistic enough to feel familiar to any JRPG veteran. It’s not inherently flawed, but the game balance so far has not been conducive to tactical depth or tension.
In its favor, one could point out that, unlike Record Keeper, Brave Exvius actually includes most of the elements of a full-fledged standalone RPG. There are dungeons and towns to explore, and there is a story and lots of dialogue. I personally find that these things bog down the mobile experience. I don’t have time to go on fetch quests, and I don’t enjoy wandering around using clumsy touchscreen controls and getting caught in random encounters en route to a dead end in a dungeon. As for the story, it’s laughably poor and nowhere near worthy of the Final Fantasy name. A mix of dull cliches and asinine banter between the two dimwitted male leads, it feels like any random uninspired C-tier JRPG from the 32-bit or even 16-bit era.
The only bright spots to Brave Exvius are the music and the hi-res graphics, which are all brand new. The art style is colorful and cartoony. It doesn't do much for me personally. It doesn’t offer the nostalgic appeal of Record Keeper’s SNES-style sprites, and it also bears no resemblance to the art of Yoshitaka Amano or Tetsuya Nomura. Basically, Edgar and Sabin in this game don’t really look like Edgar and Sabin to me, which further contributes to the perception of Brave Exvius as an “impostor” Final Fantasy.
Mobius Final Fantasy
Unlike Record Keeper and Brave Exvius, Mobius Final Fantasy is developed internally by Square Enix, and immediately it comes off quite a bit more ambitious than the other free-to-play mobile games. The 3-D visuals, evocative of Final Fantasy X, are perhaps of the caliber of last-gen console graphics, though lacking the variety of a full-budget release. There are also fully voiced cutscenes. Perhaps what really sets it apart, though, is that, unlike Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Mobius Final Fantasy actually has a story and, unlike Brave Exvius, that story actually feels like a real Final Fantasy, albeit stripped down.
The plot could be considered a very loose reimagining of the first Final Fantasy. The amnesiac player character in Mobius Final Fantasy is referred to as the “Warrior of Light,” and there is also a Garland, a Princess Sarah, and a Chaos. There are also numerous references to other Final Fantasy titles, but the game doesn’t lean on nostalgia. Mobius Final Fantasy feels like a new addition to the Final Fantasy canon, and that is something I can respect. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s an especially interesting tale, but the telling, in keeping with the rest of writer Kazushige Nojima’s oeuvre, is gloomy and introspective, and there are elements of mystery and intrigue that are at least more compelling than anything in Brave Exvius.
The battle engine is also mostly original, and, as with the story, I respect the ambition, though I don’t love the actual experience. The combat is quasi-card-based. You can equip up to four ability cards to take with you into battle, and these will cover your spells, healing, special techniques, basically anything other than regular attacks. Once in battle, these abilities in turn are powered by elemental orbs that are randomly drawn each time you perform a regular attack. When it works, it can feel quite strategic, and you’ll pat yourself on the back for knowing when to play which card to win a round in the minimum number of moves. At other times, it will seem like the game just refuses to deal you the right orbs, and you’ll curse the randomness of it all.
Currently, the game’s undoing is that the battles take too long and occur too frequently. The pacing, in terms of both the plot and the leveling system, is plodding. Your gameplay progression can be measured in the number of job classes you’ve mastered. To even unlock most jobs, you have to pull from the gacha system. One positive is that there are no “doubles"; the gacha will never deal you a job you already own, so you’re guaranteed to eventually get the job you want. Honestly though, unlocking a new job class just isn’t as exciting as unlocking a new character, so this isn’t all that enticing to begin with. Then, even once you get a new job, in order to level it up, you have to grind through thousands of tedious battles to gather the right materials.
I’m still keeping one eye on Mobius Final Fantasy, understanding that it just came out and might take another month or two to get going, but right now the story is too limited and the gameplay far too repetitive for me to actively invest my time in it.
Evolving Together
Three free-to-play mobile games may not seem like much of a renaissance, especially when only one of them comes recommended. But, like I said, Final Fantasy Record Keeper has helped to remind me that I really do love this series. Some of that is nostalgia, true. But a large part of what makes Record Keeper work has to do with how it departs from the Final Fantasy games of my youth. I have outgrown the series as represented by Final Fantasy XV, but it isn't because it has become overrun with sullen pretty boys. At least, that isn't the only reason. At my age now, I can't see myself ever having the time to invest in another console Final Fantasy. And that's why I'm so pleased to find the game evolving, in its better mobile incarnations, into something more considerate of my circumstances—something I have on hand at all times but can play in short bursts without it taking up all my time. Even just five years ago, the idea of one of my favorite video game series going mobile is something I would have fought. Now, I find that Final Fantasy on mobile is the Final Fantasy comeback I'd been waiting for, and I'm excited to see more.
About a year and a half on since I summed up Final Fantasy Record Keeper as “a good diversion for about a weekend,” I have logged more time in this game than in any other over the same span. As such, I thought it fair to revise my assessment.
The basic premise and mechanics remain much the same. Each numbered Final Fantasy game is featured as a realm in Record Keeper, and each realm offers “dungeons” reenacting sections from the original games. These dungeons consist typically of three-to-four stages of consecutive battles against basic enemies, usually finishing with a boss encounter at the end of the final stage. There is no overworld, no exploring, and not a lot of story.
What has changed is the breadth of content, as DeNA continues to add new dungeons at a steady rate. If you were to begin playing Final Fantasy Record Keeper today, there would be enough content to occupy you for probably a few months before you would be all caught up. Currently in the global release, no realm has yet been covered in full (although most are close, as of this writing). Sequel and spin-off titles, such as Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, have also proven fair game for inclusion, and even Final Fantasy Tactics has been featured, so there is potentially enough material to mine from to extend Record Keeper’s life another year at least. The impending release of Final Fantasy XV should also help.
Warriors of Light, Dark, and Everything in Between
The most appealing aspect of Final Fantasy Record Keeper is definitely the large quantity of playable characters you can unlock to rotate into your five-person party. Nearly every significant party member from a numbered non-MMO Final Fantasy is currently available, and even some villains and supporting characters have been enlisted into the Record Keeper army.
Considering it’s a free-to-play game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is extraordinarily generous in how it distributes these unlockables. Characters are not walled behind moneyed barriers or any ridiculous “gacha” lottery; all of them can be acquired just by completing dungeons. These are not even the hard dungeons; the characters—that is, the most desirable spoils in the game—are the easiest things to acquire. As someone who has been playing since near the beginning, I now have well over 100 party members, including marquee characters of the PlayStation era, classic heroes from the 16-bit generation, and some really cool deep cuts.
They’re not just trophies. The developers have included an impressive amount of detail in adapting the characters to fit Record Keeper’s visuals and mechanics. For characters from the PlayStation era and on, part of the fun is in seeing these originally polygonal heroes rendered as charming 16-bit sprites. It’s even more exciting, however, to see DeNA and Square Enix try to faithfully represent each character’s individual strengths and skills while keeping everyone balanced within Record Keeper’s gameplay. The game incorporates abilities from all of the represented titles and adapts them into an Active Time Battle system based on that of the 16-bit installments, but it doesn’t play exactly like any of them, which means the developers have to take certain liberties in order to fit existing characters into new mechanics.
Take Celes from Final Fantasy VI, for example. The designers must have felt that her signature Runic ability would be a little too juiced as a normal command, since it completely shuts down many enemy spellcasters. Instead, in homage to her job class of Rune Knight—a sturdy, sword-wielding mage—they gave her the ability to use the Spellblade/Mystic Knight’s elemental sword attacks. These are techniques that didn’t even exist in Final Fantasy VI! It’s not strictly faithful to her original form, but her Record Keeper incarnation is an interesting interpretation and one of this game’s more awesome characters.
Gacha:A More Insidious Monster-in-a-Box
Next to the characters themselves, ”5-star” weapons and armors are the most enticing collectibles in the game. The few weapons and armors you can acquire through gameplay are mostly generic items with names like “Knife” and “Leather Armor.” Almost any weapon or armor with even the slightest bit of name recognition is elevated in Record Keeper to storied 5-star status. This includes weapons such as the Buster Sword and Hardedge, both originally among the weakest swords in Final Fantasy VII.
5-star relics are extremely powerful, especially those that have been additionally flagged as “unique.” A unique relic, when equipped by the specific character with whom the item is most closely associated, will bestow that user with a signature Soul Break technique (this game’s equivalent of Limit Breaks, Trance, Overdrive, etc.). These Soul Breaks include powerful attacks hitting for 9999 damage or more, party-wide healing spells, potent party-wide multi-buffs (e.g. both Protect and Haste on the entire party), and a few singular abilities that are mechanics unto themselves (e.g. Celes’s Runic). Unique 5-stars are so positively game-changing that, upon acquiring your first one, your entire strategy becomes likely to revolve around it, at least until you get an even better one.
5-star weapons and armors can only be acquired by chance via the Relic Draw gacha system, and this is where the game’s freemium scheme comes into play. Although every player gets one free draw per day, these “common” draws are not likely to yield even a 2-star item more than once a month. For any real shot at pulling anything better than a 3-star, you have to buy into the rare draws, which requires using either actual money ($2.99 per draw) or Mythril, the game’s virtual currency (with a conversion rate of roughly 5 Mythril = $3). Awarded for completing various tasks, Mythril is not exactly finite, but DeNA controls the supply; you cannot farm it.
Even with the enhanced odds offered in the rare draws, your chance of pulling a 5-star is probably only about 10 percent (there’s a distressing lack of transparency about the exact odds). And even if you do get one, it probably won’t be the specific one you were hoping for. Most purely free players, such as myself, will be glad for any 5-star, but whales with their hearts set on a specific favorite character’s item, such as Sephiroth’s One-Winged Angel katana, can potentially blow through hundreds of dollars before pulling it.
Like any gacha, the game is not above cruelly exploiting those with gambling addictions. That’s really the basis of its business model and a discussion beyond the scope of this post. I will say that I have not spent a single penny on this game, yet, over the year and a half I’ve been playing, I’ve managed to collect a couple dozen good 5-star relics just through spending Mythril. Luck plays a part, no doubt, but provided you have the self-control to resist spending all your money chasing shiny virtual weapons, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is much fairer than any other gacha I’ve encountered. Remember also that 5-star relics, while helpful, are not necessary to win any but the most difficult of optional battles.
A Game for Those Who Fight
As a numbers game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is every bit as robust as a traditional Final Fantasy. Characters are rated across seven statistical attributes. There are seventeen different ability schools and counting, each providing access to diverse sets of magical or physical techniques divided into six ranks within each school. There are over fifteen weapon types and seven armor types. Each character can also equip an accessory and a passive skill. With minor exceptions, characters’ equipment and ability proficiency levels are set in stone, but you still have a ton of options in how you organize your team and outfit each party member.
With all the experience and gear I’ve accumulated, at this point I can auto-battle through most fights without much thought. The exceptions are the challenge battles that cap off the weekly limited-time events. The hardest of these are the hardest battles I’ve personally fought in any Final Fantasy game. They require serious preparation and planning because they cannot be brute-forced through. These are bosses that are so fast that you need Haste just to keep up. They have so much defense and HP that they can outlast all your ability uses. And they get stronger and more aggressive as they near death, which means they’re at their toughest right when you are at your most spent.
I’ll never forget my victory over the Archaeosaur (T-Rexaur from Final Fantasy VIII) in one of the earlier events. Archaeosaur was a beast that could KO any of my party members in two hits or less, and it had attacks that could target the entire party, meaning it could potentially wipe me out in a mere two turns. Although weak to ice, it would auto-counter any black magic, so nuking it would only expedite my own demise. My narrow path to victory lay through exploiting its many status vulnerabilities. I had to paralyze, blind, sleep, and poison it. The first three were to keep it from killing me, while the poison accounted for most of the damage I dealt, as it slowly ticked the dino’s health to zero. Keep in mind, this boss was also preceded by four stages of very difficult normal enemies that I could only get through by exploiting the janky “Retaliate meta” (a tactic that seemed an awful lot like cheating, except that it was described on the official strategy site!).
The best fights always require a level of ingenuity that I never had occasion to exercise in any of the core Final Fantasy games I played (which includes all numbered installments from I to X). I’ll mention again, however, that, although challenging, even the hardest fights are doable without spending any money—something that I don’t feel is true of most gacha-based games. I’ve managed to clear all content, save for one notoriously unfair event dungeon (the original Parade Float (Elite)), and I’ve achieved mastery rank on all but two other battles (Bahamut SIN (Ultimate) and Kuja (Ultimate +)).
Of course, if you're not interested in taking on these optional challenges, you could instead just have fun toying around with cool or funny team concepts. You can finally assemble the Tetsuya Nomura dream team of Cloud, Squall, Tidus, Yuna, and Lightning. Or how about a five-dragoon party, with Ricard, Kain, Cid (FFVII), Freya, and Kimahri all taking to the skies? My new favorite is the “helmeted villains” team, consisting of Garland, Golbez, Exdeath, and Gabranth. (No fifth member for that team yet, alas. I think there are a few good candidates from Final Fantasy XIV, but they’re not in Record Keeper as of this writing.)
Remembering When Final Fantasy Mattered
Final Fantasy Record Keeper does provide a framing narrative to tie together the dungeoning across different realms, but this is barely developed. The larger part of the exposition consists of text summaries that briefly recap plot progressions between boss fights from the original games.
As someone who dropped the series after Final Fantasy X, I was intrigued at the prospect of being able to experience the more recent stories through abridged “demakes” via Record Keeper. But a few looks at the plot summaries for Final Fantasy XIII and XIV quickly had me reaching for the Excedrin.
I don’t mean that as a knock on those later titles, whose plots I still don’t feel qualified to comment on. Record Keeper’s summaries even for the games I’ve played and adored are somehow both dull and hard to follow, missing far too many details and any of the storytelling craft the series was once known for. Final Fantasy Record Keeper is not built to do justice to the opera from Final Fantasy VI, the ballroom dance from Final Fantasy VIII, the lake scene from Final Fantasy X, or whatever other cutscene might be your personal favorite. But it does recreate almost every boss fight from every numbered Final Fantasy, which should give veteran fans plenty enough to reminisce about.
Because I played Final Fantasy IV and know the game well, I don't really need Record Keeper to explain to me who Rubicante was. When that towering boss sprite takes the field and begins by respectfully addressing an enraged Edge (if he's in the party), suddenly I remember everything as vividly as though it were yesterday—a testament to the original game's captivating power, as well as to Final Fantasy Record Keeper's painstaking attention to detail in faithfully recreating these boss fights.
DeNA and Square Enix certainly did their homework, making sure to include specific lines of in-battle dialogue from the original games (if not perhaps the specific translations you grew up with), the correct battle themes and fanfares (e.g. "Not Alone" playing unbroken across a key series of battles from Final Fantasy IX), and as many battle conditions and mechanics as could reasonably be preserved (use Fire on Rubicante, and he'll return the favor by resurrecting any of your fallen party members!).
There's no denying that Final Fantasy Record Keeper leans heavily on nostalgia—that life support of the franchise through the last several years of Final Fantasy XV delays. You'll get a lot more out of its little touches if you played the original games. I still find many of the Final Fantasy XIII boss fights exhilarating, though, despite never having any idea what the characters are going on about. However well or poorly the series has aged, the Active Time Battle engine remains, frankly, leagues ahead of every other mobile free-to-play game I've encountered.
If you've NEVER been a fan of Final Fantasy, then Record Keeper may not have much to hold your interest. But as character collecting games on mobile go, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is without peer. No other game in this genre offers so large an assortment of cool characters. No other is so generous as to make every one of these characters easily obtainable at zero cost. And no other possesses anywhere near its depth of mechanics once past the collecting. No other I've tried has been worth my time, frankly, but I don't regret any of the countless hours I've now sunk into Final Fantasy Record Keeper.
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(Below, my original, outdated post from April 2, 2015 is kept for reference.)
DeNA's free-to-play mobile game Final Fantasy Record Keeper is a surprising good bit of fanservice. The premise is that the worlds and stories of the numbered Final Fantasy games exist as enchanted paintings, which the player, as some manner of royal record keeper, has been tasked with protecting against an unknown darkness seeking to erase them. The only way to do this is to dive into the paintings and basically live out the stories within.
For longtime fans of the series, this really is like walking through a museum of past adventures. Each game gets its own gallery, where players can relive the story in condensed form. Plot is doled out one dungeon at a time, in the form of just a screenshot from the original game, accompanied by a single-screen text summary. That aspect of the presentation is not likely to draw anyone not already deeply familiar with these stories. But fans should appreciate the trip down memory lane, complete with vintage 16-bit sprites. Not all of the graphics are taken directly from previous games; one of the best parts of Final Fantasy Record Keeper is seeing characters (and monsters) of the PlayStation era newly done in the retro style and fitting in charmingly with the SNES sprites. For better or worse, I don't think any of the 8-bit sprites are in there, and I'm personally a tad annoyed that the gallery for Final Fantasy IV features screenshots of the polygonal remake, rather than the SNES original. But the music is sure to fill any fan with nostalgia. It's all taken from previous games, and, as much as we may have heard some of these tracks almost too many times over the decades, Final Fantasy Record Keeper does contain a large enough selection of enduring classics, so that the sound doesn't get repetitive while you're playing. Indeed, follow up a Final Fantasy IV chapter with an episode out of Final Fantasy VII (as can happen in this game), and one comes to newly appreciate just how extensive was composer Nobuo Uematsu's oeuvre over the 15+ years that he spent on this series.
Now, as a game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper isn't so much the stuff of legend, but it can be fun for a while. The combat is a simplistic take on the Active Time Battle system, where you'll mostly be tapping "Attack" over and over again. You can unlock characters from the original games to add to your party, and this really is the best part of Final Fantasy Record Keeper—collecting all your favorites and putting together a dream team. (I found a five-man party consisting of Cloud, Kain, Wakka, White Mage, and record keeper Tyro to be most effective.) The game does a good job of making the characters feel distinct in their stats, abilities, and equipment. All the equipment is also taken from previous games. And the game cleverly encourages players to rotate party members in and out, because characters (and equipment) receive huge bonuses while in their own realms.
It can be a good diversion for about a weekend, which is fair for the starting price. But it rapidly becomes more grueling after that. Each dungeon consists of a few rounds of regular enemies, followed by a boss. The boss battles are probably the only legitimately exciting part of the gameplay, as many of them require a bit of care (remember to watch out for Antlion's counterattacks!). But they also seem to grow exponentially more difficult after about the fifteenth dungeon or so. And it's especially annoying that the regular enemies that precede them, fairly consistently pushovers throughout my experience, are never any indication of the difficulty of the level boss.
Since new equipment is rare—the only way to get anything good is usually randomly through the daily drawing—your only real recourse is to level-grind. Even if you were down for the tedium, however, this is where Final Fantasy Record Keeper's freemium aspects kick in and impede your attempts to just grind away. The player's ability to battle is limited by their "Stamina." It costs Stamina points even to enter any dungeon, and, once you've exhausted them, your only options are to either wait for them to recharge (at a rate of 1 point per 3 minutes), or spend real-world money to restore them instantly. As you progress through the game, later dungeons require increasingly greater amounts of Stamina to enter and complete, so there's gradually less and less for you to do, unless you're willing to pay up. Money is also used for other things, such as healing mid-dungeon, or getting more tickets for the daily drawing. There is a free alternative to money that can do the same things, Mythril, which can be earned in-game, but there is a finite amount of Mythril to be gotten.
I got bored of the game after about two days with it, not only because of the tedium, but because it just stopped incentivizing me after a while. It was exciting when I was unlocking new realms and especially new characters from the first three worlds—VII, X, and IV—but then I opened up the galleries for V and VI, and neither had any name characters for me to unlock. I don't think I've even come across a single piece of equipment from VI. Maybe they're holding these things back for now, saving them for special events, which are the online aspect. Right now, for example, there is a Final Fantasy VII event that runs until April 11, 2015—a lengthy dungeon, where you can unlock Tifa and Sephiroth to add to your party. Like the rest of the game, this event dungeon becomes quickly more difficult and costlier to your Stamina with each successive floor. And, even though the deadline, as of my writing, is more than a week away, this truly is a multiple-day undertaking. I think mathematically, if you can't manage to keep a certain pace, at some point you just won't be able to keep recharging your Stamina quickly enough to get through the whole thing without paying. What happens when the deadline passes? Will you miss your chance to unlock Tifa and Sephiroth? I have no idea, but, for sure, I'm not going to make it.
(This first one's actually from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Perhaps note the differences in visual quality I mentioned in my previous posts about each game. Even the text boxes are snazzier in Tactics Ogre.)
Among the most luxurious of the little luxuries in Square Enix's PSP remake of Tactics Ogre is the ability to save a screen capture at any time via a simple two-button combination. The game will save the image to the memory stick in pristine resolution, with an added copyright stamp to make it look extra legit, as though you got the screenshot directly from the publisher. Time was, even a leading enthusiast publication like Electronic Gaming Monthly would have a hard time getting quality images of games for its coverage. Moving forward, we should nowadays expect some sort of built-in screen (and video) capture feature to be standard on all consoles, allowing even amateur bloggers to share their best in-game moments across the web.
It's too bad I didn't take more screens during my playthrough of Tactics Ogre. I didn't originally plan to run an image-heavy blog. Since I'm not an artist, any picture I post would almost certainly be some stock image taken from somewhere else, so what would even be the point, right? But, in researching the traffic data on my old blog (which, despite not having had new content posted to it in several months, still gets several times more hits daily than this blog), I realized that it got far more hits via Google's image search than via plain Google web search. So, while playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for the PSP, I made sure to take several screen captures in preparation for an image-heavy blog post. Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't actually have a built-in screen capture feature—Tactics Ogre was a little ahead of the curve in that regard—but a few simple hacks will get you there (and, honestly, is there a single PSP owner who hasn't hacked their system?).
So, while admitting that this entire post is little more than a shameless traffic-grab, I'll just highlight some of the new content that The War of the Lions adds over the original Final Fantasy Tactics, since I imagine that's what would be of greatest interest about the game to my readers.
A lighthearted scene taking place on Agrias's birthday:
This yields the brand new "Tynar Rouge" accessory for female characters. Equip it on Agrias, and she'll give Orlandeau a run for his money as the game's most dominating character.
Luso, game hunter and protagonist of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the DS, joins the party:
His "Game Hunter" class comes with the same abilities as Ramza's unique "Squire" class, and Luso's stats are mostly the same as Ramza's as well. His one distinguishing characteristic is that, while in his default class, he has an innate "Poach" ability, meaning that any monster he cuts down will be transformed into an item for purchase at the Poachers' Den. Also, he can learn Ultima earlier than Ramza, then teach it to Ramza earlier than Ramza could learn it in the original game. Too bad Ultima sucks....
Balthier from Final Fantasy XII:
Balthier is awesome. His "Sky Pirate" class has all the same skills as Mustadio's "Machinist" class, plus he has a set of "Plunder" action abilities, which are higher-accuracy versions of the thief's "Steal" actions. But his best skill is "Barrage"—basically an "X-Fight" action that lets him attack four times in a row for half normal damage each hit, and none of the hits can be blocked or dodged. Add to that his incredible speed, high evade, and his versatility in being able to equip guns, bows, knives, swords, polearms, shields, heavy armor, and even knight swords, and he's one of the best characters in the game, at least among those without special sword skills. I only wish they had bothered to address the fact that he and Mustadio share a last name.
The new "Lionel's New Liege Lord" side quest introduces us to two new foes who have a history with Beowulf and Reis:
With it no longer being possible to steal from Marquis Elmdore, this quest is also where you'll get the Masamune and Genji Armor in the single-player game. For any of the rest of the Genji equipment, you'll have to find someone to join you for the multiplayer modes.
In the new "Disorder in the Order" side quest, Ramza hunts down some brigands formerly of his father's old unit. For some reason, Agrias participates as a guest party member in this battle. If you bring Orlandeau, he'll also have a few words. Otherwise, there's not much to see here:
An extra battle, wherein Meliadoul confronts another of the Knights Templar:
The above battle actually occurs before Meliadoul's original confrontation with her father, Folmarv, so this just fills in a small gap. Unfortunately, it's the only new Meliadoul scene, but, by the time she joins the party, you're practically at the end of the story anyway.
A pretty significant new scene that finally addresses why Agrias seems to abandon her original mission of guarding Ovelia:
As you can see, it also settles, once and for all, the age-old debate over whether Ovelia had a knife in her hand. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky.
Argath's last stand:
That's just a taste of what's new in The War of the Lions. For those curious to see more (but not curious enough to play the game for themselves), you can probably find the extra scenes and battles in their entirety on YouTube.
Next, some random shots of scenes that are not new (although they are newly translated) but that, for whatever reason, I thought were worth capturing.
A cute moment in the new translation:
Barich (AKA Balk) explains the way of things:
I didn't even remember this character from the first time I played the game, but damn if he doesn't make sense!
And, finally, more of Argath (AKA Algus) being unbelievably awful:
Yes, you read that right. He said "whoresons." And, since Google isn't quite sophisticated enough yet to connect searches to text contained in images, I'm typing out the word in order to make sure that, the next time someone does a search for "final fantasy tactics whoresons," this post will be there for them.
