Other Final Fantasy

[BFM]

Feel free to discuss the following Final Fantasy titles that weren't part of the main series:

Final Fantasy Adventure (GameBoy)
Final Fantasy Legends I-III (GameBoy)
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES)

[Dreddz]

neither was tactics or tactics Advance
All the spin offs werent nearly as good as the originals...........

[BFM]

True but Tactics and Tactics Advance were more popular than these ones and they have their own boards for discussion whereas these 4 titles do not. Have you played any of them?

[Behold the Void]

Tactics is way better than even the normal numbered series, but it has its own board.

As far as Adventure and Legends, I'm not sure about Legends but I believe Adventure is actually a Seiken Densetsu game.

[Winter Nights]

Yeah, FF Adventure was the first in the Seiken Densetsu or "Mana" series. They thought a FF title would sell better in the US than it's Japanese title would. Which is odd, as I don't think they had released an FF2 yet in the States. *shrugs*

And the FF Legend series is just garbage. Crappy battle system, color-by-numbers storylines, and horrible music even for Gameboy.

I heard bad things about Mystic Quest and always steered clear.

[DJZen]

The Final Fantasy Legend series isn't Final Fantasy, it's SaGa. And while they haven't all aged teriffically, THEY WERE GAMEBOY GAMES. Sheesh. That's like saying Pitfall had awful graphics and gameplay.

As far as Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, the people who don't like it don't appreciate simplistic RPGs, and bemoan the lack of existential nonsense and contrived "romance" storylines that have permeated the genre ever since... well... ever since. It's a fun game, albeit short and not terribly well concieved. The battle zones were just an awful idea that should have been shot down immediately, but oh well.

[Winter Nights]

Being a Gameboy game is no excuse for being crap. I played them when they first came out. They were very much crap, even for Gameboy standards.

[kikimm]

I can't stand playing games on a tiny little screen, so I've never subjected myself to the horror that is Final Fantasy Legends, or Adventure.

How do I know they are a horror? I don't. I'm making an educated guess.

[DJZen]

You know, there's these things called emulators that let you play gameboy games on your big fancy computer screen which you're probably looking at right now. Or, if you want to take the more legal route, there's the GBA player AND the Super Gameboy.

[Lord Chainsaw]

Being a Gameboy game is no excuse for being crap. I played them when they first came out. They were very much crap, even for Gameboy standards.

That certaintly is interesting. This isn't the first time I hear of dislike for the FF Legends. I'm curious to know why some of these games were disliked.

The first one is an absolute masterpiece. Its message transcends the trivial conflicts you normally see in video games. You don't get revenge on anyone and you don't save the world or any of that junk because it's the right thing to do. Its ultimate goal, expressed through the interaction of four worlds modeled from the religion of the Chinese Ssu Ling, is a very imaginative stab at what it means to live, and if living in God's Kingdom would really be as wonderful as you are lead to believe as a human being. I'm not going to spoil the game, but I will say it is definitely worth a full playthrough if you keep an open mind.

Legend II and III are not as good, although I do like Legend II as well. It borrows from pretty much every major form of mythology. The music in FF Legend II, as in Legend I, is wonderful. The battles are much better in the second one, although the game does get a little unbalanced towards the end. There's no deep, existential message in the second game. It's just good, clean fun.

Legend III had its problems, I won't deny that. It wasn't developed like the other SaGa games. The experience handouts in the game were pitifully messed up, but the battles were nice and fast. The boss fights were a lot of fun, but you get the feeling that because the boss fights last so long, levels really don't mean anything. When a boss takes 25 rounds to beat, what difference does leveling up twice and beating him in one less round mean?

[DJZen]

I actually liked SaGa 2 and 3. Granted I played them for about an hour each at a friend's house while he was building maps for Marathon 2 or something, but I still found them very fun.

[theundeadhero]

Legends II was one of my first RPGs and I enjoy it very much. I've beaten it too many times to count. Legends I was an okay game as far as games go and as mentioned before the story is interesting. I haven't yet managed to complete Legends III yet, but I'm currently working on it.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Tim Rogers trashes the first three SaGa games in his Minstrel Song review (http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=saga). Dispute this.

[DJZen]

Sooner or later, though, after poking around in three or four quests -- the most any hardcore role-playing gamer who doesn't love 7th Saga is going to be able to stomach -- we'll grow tired of this game's world

I think this sums up his entire review. Ya know, Timmy, maybe you wouldn't find games like the SaGa series so horribly confusing if you'd READ THE ****ING MANUAL!!!!! Any idiot who's purchased Final Fantasy Origins or Dawn of Souls can tell you the "mysterious voodoo magic" process involved in raising your stats. Granted, there's a lot that WASN'T documented about the game, but that's not the fault of the game designers so much as it is the fault of the manual writers. This whole article reads like a whiney fanboy having a hissy fit that some insolent developer somewhere dared to release a game that wasn't FFVII. Perhaps if he spent as much time and energy trying to learn the mechanics of the game as he did using his MS word thesaurus --and as many asides as possible-- in an effort to pass himself off as someone of importance and authority, he would actually come off as what he was trying to sound like. Instead, he sounds more like the sort of person who spent 5 minutes playing the game, threw his controller across the room and called it "the gayest thing ever". It's a well known fact that Akitoshi Kawazu's games are unpopular in the US. Taking shots at them is like making fun of the fat kid. You COULD do it, it'd be very easy to do, but you'll just come off seeming like a complete jerk and ruining ANY chances of finding some sort of female companionship (or male companionship for that matter), all without improving your social standing or impressing anyone. Then again, this is the same guy who thought FFVI was overrought and anti-climatic, so I guess I'm going against my own advice here by typing this, in that I'm making fun of someone who's essentially a sitting duck for insults. ICONOCLASM ONLY WORKS IF YOU'RE POINTING OUT REAL FLAWS IN SOMETHING THAT IS ACTUALLY POPULAR IN A MAINSTREAM SENSE!!!

Is that enough of a dispute?

[Winter Nights]

Sooner or later, though, after poking around in three or four quests -- the most any hardcore role-playing gamer who doesn't love 7th Saga is going to be able to stomach -- we'll grow tired of this game's world

I think this sums up his entire review. Ya know, Timmy, maybe you wouldn't find games like the SaGa series so horribly confusing if you'd READ THE ****ING MANUAL!!!!! Any idiot who's purchased Final Fantasy Origins or Dawn of Souls can tell you the "mysterious voodoo magic" process involved in raising your stats. Granted, there's a lot that WASN'T documented about the game, but that's not the fault of the game designers so much as it is the fault of the manual writers. This whole article reads like a whiney fanboy having a hissy fit that some insolent developer somewhere dared to release a game that wasn't FFVII. Perhaps if he spent as much time and energy trying to learn the mechanics of the game as he did using his MS word thesaurus --and as many asides as possible-- in an effort to pass himself off as someone of importance and authority, he would actually come off as what he was trying to sound like. Instead, he sounds more like the sort of person who spent 5 minutes playing the game, threw his controller across the room and called it "the gayest thing ever". It's a well known fact that Akitoshi Kawazu's games are unpopular in the US. Taking shots at them is like making fun of the fat kid. You COULD do it, it'd be very easy to do, but you'll just come off seeming like a complete jerk and ruining ANY chances of finding some sort of female companionship (or male companionship for that matter), all without improving your social standing or impressing anyone. Then again, this is the same guy who thought FFVI was overrought and anti-climatic, so I guess I'm going against my own advice here by typing this, in that I'm making fun of someone who's essentially a sitting duck for insults. ICONOCLASM ONLY WORKS IF YOU'RE POINTING OUT REAL FLAWS IN SOMETHING THAT IS ACTUALLY POPULAR IN A MAINSTREAM SENSE!!!

Is that enough of a dispute?
Did you just throw a whiney fanboy hissy fit over someone else throwing a whiney fanboy hissy fit?? :rolleyes2

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Is that enough of a dispute?I'd still like to hear from Messr. Chainsaw.

[Lord Chainsaw]

The entire article just reeks of BS. It's clear the guy hated the game before he even put in the cartridge.


If we revist the original SaGa for a moment, we'll see the trend that sets up the rest of Kawazu's career -- the game, though the player holds it in his hands, never lets us feel comfortable. There are innumerable ways to screw up so that you might wind up standing at the feet of the final boss, one step away from engaging him in conversation and beginning the final battle, and be hopelessly unable to win. This is because there's a weapon called the "Glass Sword," the only weapon that can hurt him, and you can only get it between the fourth floor of the tower and the top, where you fight a being called Ashura, who sends you back to the bottom. The next time you enter the tower, it's an all-new straight shot to the top. You can no longer find that one tiny little far-off hidden room on the way to Ashura's place. Had you forgotten to pick it up, the Glass Sword remains not yours forever, and you cannot beat the final boss. Even more interestingly, the Glass Sword, like most weapons in the game, can only be used fifty times before it vanishes forever. The charm of the game is, supposedly, that each hero can store as many weapons as he sees appropriate, and use them on enemies as he wishes. So our human party leader can be carrying a sword, a machinegun, a fire spell, a whip, and a punch. (Yes, a punch is an inventory item.) Some weapons have higher damage-dealing capabilities than others, though who's to tell, really, what's what? You use the weapons, you kill the monsters, and you move on.

Did this guy even PLAY the game? If he had like he said he had, he would know that the Glass Sword was meant to be the most powerful weapon in the game with a single use, but instead falls under the same 50 uses as the other weapons. There is nothing special about that weapon other than the fact that it does a large amount of set damage, as opposed to the strength or agility multipliers on other weapons in the game. I, unlike that dude, have actually played the game and thoroughly enjoyed it, and have a save file right before the last boss (one of my favorite final battles in game history).

First of all, the last boss is just like any other boss in the game, and like most other bosses in the history of RPGs. That is, you reduce his 5000 or so HP to 0, and you win. It's that simple. Where in the world this "you need the glass sword" to beat him comes from, I have no clue. Hell, all you need to do is beat him is have the right monster in your party and use the "Saw" ability to kill him in one hit. Or you can just spam Flare books on him until he's toast. He's not hard at all. And if you do get stuck before the fight, just use a portal to transport yourself back to the base and level up some more. It's not rocket science.

And the guy is completely out of it with the breakable weapons too. Once again, it appears he didn't actually bother to play the game, because if he did, he'd know you could buy Arcane toolsets to fix broken weapons (yes, even the glass sword). And if he doesn't like broken weapons, he shouldn't be playing SaGa games. Period. The early SaGa games revolve around GP instead of experience, so managing broken equipment is part of the expense you need to factor in when buying new stats.

I obviously don't need to refute this guy's opinions if he can't bother to understand the game he's playing.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Congratulations, you have surmounted the challenge of Tim Rogers. You are now clear to encounter the final obstacle.

[DJZen]

I spent some quality time with my emulator this morning and I'm forced to agree with Chainsaw on this one. Even the BRIEFEST of glimpses at gamefaqs shows that the guy had no idea what he was talking about. 600 HP is all you get? No, mutants and monsters can have 999 HP, and humans can even exceed that, though the game won't display it. Hooray for research.

[Lord Chainsaw]

I said I wasn't going to bother with this guy because he doesn't know what he's talking about, but I just have to take the bait.




SaGa revels in making the player feel as though his chances are running out. Final Fantasy makes a young player walk around in circles for six hours to save up enough money to buy a Silver Sword, which will make the Marsh Cave objectively 30 times easier. The Final Fantasy player feels much like a young boy being given an electric guitar; he knows that, with practice, he can one day rock the Budokan. The SaGa player, when the bus ride ends and he's home after work sitting against the balcony door with a cigarette and a bottle of beer, feels like an aging hipster who has, literally, one last chance to impress a crowd with his rock and roll. SaGa revels in making the player feel sick and lonely. In its fourth world, the post-apocalyptic one, non-player characters are set up like stick figures or finger puppets; members of a resistance group, they are raging against Suzaku, a giant malicious phoenix who eventually, over the course of four hours, devours and destoys them all one-by-one, as we learn their names. No doubt Kawazu thought this was funny. It's not funny. It's mean. The ten-year-old me wanted to wag my finger at Kawazu like I was his mother and he'd just pushed a kid down the stairs at school. It was a naughty thing to do, and the game just kept doing it, again and again. Surprises heaped on surprises until the story, which no one really cared about in the first place (we were just gaining levels on the bus, see), had contradicted itself into nothingness. So the tower goes to Heaven, and the being at the top is evil? Okay? Though he's not really the real god -- the other guy is, and he's evil too? The player's so numerically being in control of his characters progress turned out to be a sneering curse as well, like, "Yeah, you thought we'd keep giving you these hit-point upgrades, huh? Well! No! 600 is all you get! Now you're weak, and the monsters are strong! You'd best start running!"

This guy seems to be missing the entire point of the game. He's looking at the game from a Nintendo mentality as oppose to an artistic one. Yes, the game is very morbid. In his article he makes it seem as if there's just random acts of killing off characters to advance the story. There's a reason for that. I really don't want to spoil a game this incredible, but:

This is a very rare game in which the gameplay actually tells the story. This isn't an RPG where there's a war going on, and the story is told in cutscenes between different dungeons on your quest to take down the evil empire. The gameplay IS the story. You don't know it throughout the game, but God is testing the best fighters on Earth for the qualities he desires in a heavenly companion. It's sort of like a really screwed up reality show. That means that every single character in the game besides the main party is actually a backdrop created by God to fit his exam. World 4 isn't mindless killing, it's God testing how paradisial candidates will deal with fire, wrath, death, and sorrow. Splendid little game, really.

And to counter his last point, yes, Ashura is the boss at the top of the Tower, and yes, he is the "ultimate evil". He questions why the boss at the top of the Tower to Heaven is evil. Then this clueless writer questions the validity of the "other guy" after Ashura, who turns out to be just a bigger evil. I already spoiled one of the best points to the game, so I'm not going to spoil anything else. Let's just say that if he decided to pay attention to the game instead of just grumble about the fact that it isn't Final Fantasy, he'd know he was completely wrong about who the last boss was.

[vinarian]

having beaten all final fantasy games (except V and XI)(since XI is not beatable, and my computer crashed back in the day when i was fighting the end boss of V), I can say that I enjoyed very much all of the Game boy final fantasy games, as well as mystic quest. mystic quest is a completely different style of game, much like lufia and lufia 2. I think all in all the worst final fantasy game i ever played was final fantasy 2 (JAP not US).

Oh, and there was also a very good (though not made by or endorsed by) final fantasy game that someone cloned onto the US TI-80 series calculators, it was basically a clone of legends 1, but with a few differences.

[TurkSlayer]

Feel free to discuss the following Final Fantasy titles that weren't part of the main series:

Final Fantasy Adventure (GameBoy)
Final Fantasy Legends I-III (GameBoy)
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES)

I have Legends III and I hate it with burning passion.