Dood, I killed your story!

[Wolf Kanno]

It's a little misleading but basically this is a thread to discuss complaints about story related messes throughout the whole series. Bad characters, horrible plot-twists, and poor writing are discussed here.

Who knows, maybe we'll come to an agreement on the worst story related incident in the series.;)

The whole series is up for debate and feel free to mention multiple scenes to question, I just ask for you to be specific and to understand that this isn't a "What game has the worst plot" Be friendly and be funny...

Also, cause someone brought this to my attention... This thread will contain massive spoilers especially for the more recent games, you have been warned!!! For the rest of us, please use spoiler tags if the scene in question might ruin the game for others. Thank you...

[NINJA_Ryu]

You know whats the worst?

Final Fantasy the FIRST!

geez, how did anyone EVER like it!

Mundane plot, ZERO charachter development, and they didnt even have Cid!

Chaos? Lame villan, period.

[Zeromus_X]

It's a Famicom RPG made in 1987. You can't even expect an RPG from that era to have a deep or thought-provoking storyline. The entire thing is pretty revolutionary as it is (whole time loop thing and what-not).

[Crossblades]

It's a Famicom RPG made in 1987. You can't even expect an RPG from that era to have a deep or thought-provoking storyline. The entire thing is pretty revolutionary as it is (whole time loop thing and what-not).

Exactly. Dragon Quest I was the same way

[Bahamut2000X]

It's a Famicom RPG made in 1987. You can't even expect an RPG from that era to have a deep or thought-provoking storyline. The entire thing is pretty revolutionary as it is (whole time loop thing and what-not).

Exactly 100% agree there. You can't seriously ever think a game made at the dawn of gamings birth to have a story as deep as games now a day do, do ya? Not to mention the fact that the space limits on cartridges for the NES wern't very impressive, heck I wouldn't be surprized if the first 3 FF's pushed the limits of how much could be stored on a single NES cartridge.

I'll get back to bad story on FF as I could go on about VIII and X for a while, in probably not the nicest manner. >.>

[Griff]

If anyone here has ever read any of my posts you pretty much know what I'm going to say when it comes to bad storylines and character development (or lack thereof). If not FF7 .
Feel free to discuss.

[Wolf Kanno]

Just a reminder, this is NOT a discussion of the worst game in the series overall (besides, we all know it's FFX-2:rolleyes2 ), and please be specific about story scenes. List as much as you want.


Worst plot twist, FFX for the whole "Tidus is some dead people's dream". If they had planned to kill him off instead of Yuna, they could have done it better, instead of throwing this odd ball twist that served no purpose rather than to kill Tidus off in the end.

Zidane's past from FFIX. I've complained about this before. I usually don't care when a game rips off another games storyline as long as it is done well. I cannot condone a game ripping off the plot of itself. Zidane's past is basically the same as Vivi's. Both are manufactured bio weapons created to cause war and chaos in Gaia. This game was going great till they landed this pile of :skull::skull::skull::skull: in my lap. It wasn't even done very well!

[Azure Chrysanthemum]

Tales of Legendia rehashed a bunch of old character concepts from earlier, better Tales games. And the plot and theme was right out of generic shounen manga #361.

[Jowy]

That and you can win every single battle by just bashing your fist against the controller.

[Shlup]

Behold the Void, the topic of this thread is Final Fantasy games, not Tales games. Please do not go off-topic in threads; it is considered spam and if your behavior does not improve you will be banned.

[The Captain]

That's a plot twist right there.







I think all of the FF games had some plot device that felt forced. Each one had at least one moment, whether it be explaining a character's motivation or history or explaining a plot device that really probably wouldn't happen, but must for the game to continue.


Take care all.

[Bunny]

You know whats the worst?

Final Fantasy the FIRST!

geez, how did anyone EVER like it!

Mundane plot, ZERO charachter development, and they didnt even have Cid!

Chaos? Lame villan, period.

What are you talking about? My thief turned into a ninja. That's development!

P.S. Chaos is better than Sin. Tra-la-la~


Worst plot twist, FFX for the whole "Tidus is some dead people's dream". If they had planned to kill him off instead of Yuna, they could have done it better, instead of throwing this odd ball twist that served no purpose rather than to kill Tidus off in the end.

I agree with this. Although I only liked three things about FFX: The Grid System, the difficulty or lack thereof, and that it ended. Not the ending, mind you. Just the fact that it ended.

[Wild0ne]

Things I hate about the series:

FFI - The characters don't have names!! No!! What were their mothers thinking?? "You just gave birth to a Light Warrior!! He is gonna save the world one day. What do you want to name him?" "Uh, I don't know!!"

FFII - What were they thinking here? Your characters don't level up with experience, but with healed scars....crappy. "Hey I need more HP!! Can you bash my face in with your club?? Thank you!!"

FFV - I liked everything except the fact !Rapidfire + Dualwield on Advance just owns everything...Just makes people sad when you can have four characters attack 32 times, thats just overkill. And no 12 million HP boss to take out..... "Hey the last boss. One round. 10 seconds of playing. 30 minutes of waiting for the end. Good Times."

FFVIII - What no MP?? Can't but new weapons?? The GF's (summons) can die?? A card game???? WTF is junctioning?? Its like a new series all its own. These are just some of the things I didnt like. "Hey did you hear a new FF came out? No MP!! Then how the heck do I cast spells?? Getting them from creatures?? And I thought just trying to kill creatures every 3 seconds was annoying.."

FFX - The sphere grid IMO sucked. Just level the guys and let then build themselves. If I wanted to choose to make everyone have the same abilites or something confusing with leveling, I would play something else....Also didn't like the part about making weapons. I thinking weapons should be unique... "Tidus just gained a sphere level!! What does that mean??? I don't know!! I need an instruction booklet just to level up!!!!!"

That's all for now....

[Azure Chrysanthemum]

Behold the Void, the topic of this thread is Final Fantasy games, not Tales games. Please do not go off-topic in threads; it is considered spam and if your behavior does not improve you will be banned.

:frust:

Well if you want to be THAT way about it.

I will say FFVII's story never really impressed me.

At all.

May be partly because of the hype, but I found it to be profoundly mediocre and unimpressive.

However, at least I was able to finish FFVII. Between FFVIII's system and plot, well, let's just say I could only stomache so much.

[NeoCracker]

Tidus Being a Dream was pretty bad, though I'll admit him going away in the end was pretty well done.

Bringing him back in X-2 however completely massacered X's ending.

[Slothy]

Worst plot twist, FFX for the whole "Tidus is some dead people's dream". If they had planned to kill him off instead of Yuna, they could have done it better, instead of throwing this odd ball twist that served no purpose rather than to kill Tidus off in the end.

You see, I always loved this because it helped show the changes in Tidus' character by the end. He went from being a bit of a whiny jock to selfless hero. I mean he knew he was going to die when they beat Sin. This wasn't a "this is very dangerous and we could be killed" sort of situation. Win or lose, he knew he'd be gone but he fought to stop Sin anyway.

As for what I thought was the weakest moment in the series story-wise, FFVIII comes to mind.

Characters: GF's made us forget we were orphans.
Irvine: I knew you all the entire time but decided to never mention it until now.
Characters: How can we fight Edea now that we know she raised us?

Of all the convoluted piles of crap. I would have preferred them knowing all about their past from the start and realising who Edea was when they first saw her. Would have made a lot more sense and been much less of a slap in my face. I can't stand plot devices this stupid meant to heavy handedly engineer drama. The story could easily have worked without this with a little rewriting and may have had more of a positive impact on me.

[XxSephirothxX]

FFVIII. I would say the whole fucking game, but that would be a little too judgmental. I think the whole "Oh, the GFs made us lose all our memories and we've actually known each other since we were kids" thing is possibly the worst plot twist I've ever seen. I seriously imagine a group of Squaresoft writers sitting in a room, halfway done with their game, and coming to the conclusion that their game wasn't going anywhere, so they had to throw some :skull::skull::skull::skull: in there to tie it all together. Bad, bad, bad, bad.

[Avarice-ness]

You know whats the worst?

Final Fantasy the FIRST!

geez, how did anyone EVER like it!

Mundane plot, ZERO charachter development, and they didnt even have Cid!

Chaos? Lame villan, period.

Yeah I still to this day have no idea what I was doing when I was playing it, all I knew was Chaos was bad, so I kill him. Then the games over and I'm just confused. I don't know why I killed him but I know I did good because the game said so.

I didn't have the attention span to keep up with FFVIII, In my head there was 18 plots going on at the same time twisting into this horrible pretzel of doom.

And still regardless of how much I love VI, Everyone seems like everythings going to be A-Okay after you kill Kefka, and AGAIN, for the 100th time. FFVI planet doesn't heal itself like FFVII's does, Therefore..
Yay someone grew a plant! But prolly 20 minutes later an earthquakes going to hit and everything dies. I'd want to see a thingo showing what happened after they killed kefka because I'm sure with out the goddess' keeping things intact, that worlds got to have 20times the fail than the world of ruin had. I'd take Kefka torching everything over the planet trying to repair itself//crumbling slowly to it's demise any day. :)

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Life is the most prevalent thing in the universe. Given basic resources like water, air, and soil, it'll always manage to survive, and sometimes it even finds a way to thrive without those things. In the World of Ruin, its main obstacle was Kefka himself, and once the heroes offed him, there was no oppressive force left to stop it from spreading again.

[DarkLadyNyara]

FFII- The emperor can create cyclones that wipe cities of the map, but gets taken out by a group of four? That has always seemed a bit...odd to me. Also, "Oh, Leon betrayed us for no reason and tried to kill us, but it's okay, he says he's on our side now." :rolleyes2 Morons.

FFIV- Bad guy's from the moon. "nuff said.

VIII- The whole GF memory thing came off way too forced. The sad part is that it could have been done well. :(

[LunarWeaver]

I liked the FFVIII memory thing :jess:.

I always wondered why Shinra sent Sephy-popo to Nibelheim when the mansion there contained an assload of secrets about him :(.

[Griff]

The worst story point for me was Cloud's "I thought I was in SOLDIER, but really I was a total loser" part. The sad thing is that this is probably the best case of character development in the entire story, even though anyone who has ever written anything would tell you it's lame.

[Wolf Kanno]

Let's face it, the best thing about FFVIII's plot was that it was so damn ridiculous it was funny.

As for Tidus, they could have done it better. It was convulated and the only reasoning I can think of as to why they did it was to write themselves out of the whole time travel mess they made. Let's face it, the only decent time travel story in the FF series was FFI... Besides, it has so many plot holes that can be unraveled by simple logic. Like how does he have memories of his real life? Hell, did he even exist in the first place?

Up until this point, I thought Cloud's true past had been the greatest let down in plot twists for the series but damn... A supposed wuss who was able to get the best of an elite military bio weapon has convinced himself he's a bad ass just can't beat the guy who is a figment of a dead dude's imagination...:rolleyes2

[The Crystal]

FFII- The emperor can create cyclones that wipe cities of the map, but gets taken out by a group of four? That has always seemed a bit...odd to me.

This is normal in RPGs. Kefka, Kuja, Ex-Death, Lavos, etc. All of them couldn't be deffeated by the heros, because they are so much more powerful than the heros that is not even funny. But they were deffeated.
The only "logical" explanation is that the heros allways win. Or that the villains lost because they have a limited number of HP.


I always wondered why Shinra sent Sephy-popo to Nibelheim when the mansion there contained an assload of secrets about him :(.

Me too.

[Sefie1999AD]

Let's see now.

FFI - The whole time loop thing. I still don't think it makes sense.

FFIV - I think everyone was too harsh towards Edward when his home and kingdom were destroyed. It was also kind of foolish of the characters to go to the Sealed Cave and get the crystal since Golbez couldn't get there himself.

FFVI - There's pretty much no storyline in the World of Ruin. Sure, there's a lot of character development, but pretty much the only thing that happens there is the characters defeating Kefka.

FFVIII - The GFs causing everyone to forget they've been in the same orphanage, except Irvine who didn't use GFs for some reason. Even the way how they were in the same orphanage felt like a cheap way to tie those characters together.

That's some of the things I could come up, at least for now.

[Ryth]

Everything in FFVIII made me hate RPGs a little.

[LazarCotoron]

See, I have a different thought on the plot twist of FFVIII-nevermind that I thought it was just the sort of thing that I looked at and went "...oooohhkay..." I think they did it to create threads like this one.

Truly doth their evil know no limits as it continues to permeate our very world to this day...

[Dr. Acula]

FF1: Not much storyline and no character development. In any case, it was a nice change from the following Final Fantasies whose storylines are MADE to confuse the player.

FF2: No levels, and more bad character development. In my opinion, the WORST ff ever! (No, I haven't played X-2 yet)

FF4: "Let's kill off all the characters and bring them back to life, then bring in a new main enemy halfway through the game and when they defeat him they all become royalty!" Wtf??!

FF5: Ex-Death. The most annoying villain ever.

FF7: Cloud's past. "I lived in Nibelheim and it burned down but no-one remembers anything! But wait, no, it can't be true, because Hojo created me after Sephy died! But, wait, I KILLED Sephy! Whaddya know, I really DID grow up in Nibelheim, but everything else I made up about my life!" I like Cloud, but the whole storyline in FF7 was ass-numbingly confusing.

FF8: The fact that all of a sudden GF's make you forget things is just annoying. The characters don't even think anything's wrong with them even though they are complete amnesia-cases!

[Wolf Kanno]

FF2: No levels, and more bad character development. In my opinion, the WORST ff ever! (No, I haven't played X-2 yet)

Count yourself lucky, the game is so bad it ruined the job class system. The same system most fans feel is the best system in the series and is almost flawless. Yet somehow it found a way to make it bad.

I also agree that the entire idea of FFX-2 destroys the few redeeming qualities of FFX, like the fact it ended.

[Black Magic Shopkeeper]

FF7: Cloud's past. "I lived in Nibelheim and it burned down but no-one remembers anything! But wait, no, it can't be true, because Hojo created me after Sephy died! But, wait, I KILLED Sephy! Whaddya know, I really DID grow up in Nibelheim, but everything else I made up about my life!" I like Cloud, but the whole storyline in FF7 was ass-numbingly confusing.

Yes, and I'm STILL having trouble with that. Bah. Besides that, the storyline is kind of disconcerting. (Sorry, but it's true!)

[LunarWeaver]

As for Tidus, they could have done it better. It was convulated and the only reasoning I can think of as to why they did it was to write themselves out of the whole time travel mess they made. Let's face it, the only decent time travel story in the FF series was FFI... Besides, it has so many plot holes that can be unraveled by simple logic. Like how does he have memories of his real life? Hell, did he even exist in the first place?

There is no time travel in FFX. Tidus did not got go through 1000 years like he thought. Memories of his real life? I'm afraid I don't understand that :(. He only has one life, and that's the one given to him by the sleeping summoner's making "Dream" Zanarkand. And of course he exists.

FFX's plot is always dogged for being too simple, yet nobody seems to understand it. I thought it was just deep enough while moving from swiftly between interesting parts as the characters grew and the battle system kept me entertained. That's all that I ask from an RPG. *shrug* I know that if someone came to be with a (then) new system and said "Make the first playstation 2 Final Fantasy game" I wouldn't have done better. :jess:

Do you all really hate the FFVIII memory thing that much =o! I thought it was kinda neat and tied well into the whole time thing...Like, destiny, you know? It was all their destiny from the start to grow up and travel through time to the showdown.

Maybe I'm just too accepting of plot twists :lol:. If Star Ocean 3's whole...thing...doesn't bother me, then I doubt anything a Final Fantasy pulls is gonna.

[Takara]

FF4: "Let's kill off all the characters and bring them back to life, then bring in a new main enemy halfway through the game and when they defeat him they all become royalty!" Wtf??!

As much as I love FFIV, I must say a big "Amen!" to that.

As for the FFVIII loss of memory thing, I think it would be less annoying to many fans if it had been written better. The way it was presented in game, it felt like the writers rushed when they came to that part. I can accept the fate bit, but it came so out of the blue that the plot twist was a weak one.

Then, there's also the part where all of a sudden Squall luvs Rinoa for no apparent reason after spending two disks getting annoyed by her. That part annoys me more than the "omg u guys we grew up at the same orphanage" scene.

[Dragon Mage]

Originally Bespoken by Dr. Acula View Post
FF7: Cloud's past. "I lived in Nibelheim and it burned down but no-one remembers anything! But wait, no, it can't be true, because Hojo created me after Sephy died! But, wait, I KILLED Sephy! Whaddya know, I really DID grow up in Nibelheim, but everything else I made up about my life!" I like Cloud, but the whole storyline in FF7 was ass-numbingly confusing.


Are you kidding? That's like the easiest thing to figure out in the game. What was really bad was FFX. That's what I call a seriously screwed up game. FFX was just an ass-load of stupidity. Who the hell could take a main character like that seriously in the least? OMG, I wanted that annoying little twit of a main char to die, die, DIE!!!! Fortunately, I couldn't stomach it and didn't finish it. But good lord I wanted to see that twits' guts thrown aroung the room and his blood splash on the floor. That would have made me soooooo happy.....It makes me laugh just thinking about it. The plot?--I didn't get that far enough to care about it. The chars:*murder*. However, I never made it far enough to see if he actually did get killed. *sigh* I hope he did.

And don't get me started on the villian,omg. Who the hell could take a flying telekinitic whale seriously. Relationship, wtf? (Star Wars, hello!) Geez, I must've laughed about 20 min. when I found out that was the main villian. God that was so gay. (barf) I could take an evil squirrel as more dangerous. I honestly could. The whole game should just be purged from the gaming community.

[Wolf Kanno]

There is no time travel in FFX. Tidus did not got go through 1000 years like he thought. Memories of his real life? I'm afraid I don't understand that :(. He only has one life, and that's the one given to him by the sleeping summoner's making "Dream" Zanarkand. And of course he exists.

I know there is no real time traveling in FFX. Tidus' plot twist is the one that shows that it never happened, but for most of the game you thought he did;) . My problem is, since Tidus was created by the fayeth from their dream Zanarkand is he based on a real person? Or was he just an illusion within the dream. If he's an illusion he never really existed and that makes FFX-2 completely improbable. If he's a soul of the dead trapped in the dream, then how come "the sending" doesn't affect him? None of it was properly explained and it just led to confusion the more you think about it.

It also makes one wonder how Jecht (who's obviously in the same boat) can become an Aeon if he is just an illusion. Now I understand that most thing's in FF games are never really explained but even most of those unexplained elements have some level of logic behind it.

FFX's plot twist sorta've came out of left field. I felt it was done to not only write them out of their little corner, but to create a cheap emotional ending. I just never saw any point in it; and I felt if they wanted to do that kinda've ending, it could have been better written.


FFX's plot is always dogged for being too simple, yet nobody seems to understand it.

It is a simple storyline premise until Tidus' plot twist. Really for me, FFX failed as a story cause it was a character driven piece, written around a character that has no real emotion or personality, Yuna. She completely destroys the illusion of the adventure and the cast themselves are hindered by having to revolve their stories around her story. But this is an argument for another thread entirely so let's try to stay on topic a bit...


Do you all really hate the FFVIII memory thing that much =o! I thought it was kinda neat and tied well into the whole time thing...Like, destiny, you know? It was all their destiny from the start to grow up and travel through time to the showdown.

The major problem with FFVIII's story overall is that they tried to do so much and never really stopped to make it more cohesive. Part of this problem lies in the fact that most of FFVIII's plot is really about Squall learning to open up and love other people and himself. So it must have never seemed necessary to explain anything else that was going on. The actual storyline just comes off randomly and that was the straw that broke the camels back for most people.


Maybe I'm just too accepting of plot twists :lol:. If Star Ocean 3's whole...thing...doesn't bother me, then I doubt anything a Final Fantasy pulls is gonna.

I liked SOIII's plot twist, it sorta've sucked the drama out of it but it was starting to delve too much into territory that was better explored in Xenogears. I had been waiting for an RPG to do a plot twist like that for years so I was pretty happy.:love:

[DarkLadyNyara]

Do you all really hate the FFVIII memory thing that much =o! I thought it was kinda neat and tied well into the whole time thing...Like, destiny, you know? It was all their destiny from the start to grow up and travel through time to the showdown.

The thing that annoys me most about VIII is that I look at it and say "Damn, this could have been an amazing story". Note the could. The plot twists are too forced, and it comes off as halfhearted at best.

[chionos]

Do you all really hate the FFVIII memory thing that much =o! I thought it was kinda neat and tied well into the whole time thing...Like, destiny, you know? It was all their destiny from the start to grow up and travel through time to the showdown.

The thing that annoys me most about VIII is that I look at it and say "Damn, this could have been an amazing story". Note the could. The plot twists are too forced, and it comes off as halfhearted at best.

I agree, and this is how I feel about many FF's. Usually when I can see what they were attempting to do I use my imagination to create my own story out of the slop and end up liking the whole thing. I guess I'm lying to myself when I do that though.

Something that I hate in all ffs(and really rpgs in general):
So you've got some heros who're going off to save the freakin world, possibly sacrificing their own lives in the process, and nobody helps them out. I mean, if I was risking my life to save the world I sure as hell wouldn't pay 100k gil for a damn sword. You'd think the npc's would be throwing money and armor at the heros, but it's business as usual. It annoys me more than it should. Maybe it's done on purpose, though. Maybe SE's saying that we take for granted those people who stick their necks out for the rest of us, because we're greedy lazy bastards. Go save the world but you owe me $100 when you get back.
Another similar thing is that if I was an npc, I would be in awe of these people. They're blissfully unaware of the heros' presense. It annoys me. Though, again, it could be symbolizing our blissful ignorance. Or maybe I give SE too much credit. It's just bad npc scripting.

[Wolf Kanno]

That bothers me as well especially in Lunar... but staying on topic, if you really think about it, most of the time the world is unaware of it's emminent demise. Even if they do know about it, most are blissfully unaware of your characters involvement.

I mean, the battle against Kefka was more personal than anything. No one thougfht he could be beat nor did they ever realize that a party of adventurers were out for his head. In FFVII, your party is not exactly on the side of the law and they were actually blamed for what happened. In FFVIII, I think the world was more worried about the political crisis and all the monsters and just never realized a crazy witch from the future was going to compress time;) . In IX and technically V, the world is in shambles for half of it, so people are more concered about rebuilding. In FFX, there were several parties of summoners so they got food and hospitality. In FFXII, your party has to travel incognito for political reasons and because a few members are not exactly well respected citizens. FFI-FFIV have no real excuse though:mad:

It's still debatable though and I'm definetly stretching it a little thin in a few of them.

[Ender]

FFI: Chaos--even he didn't know what he was talking about with all that time-loop giberish.

Actually, I, III, and IV had an awful problem with developing their main villains. Well, FFI had little development of any kind, but a villain who doesn't really engage the heroes and unveil the entire purpose of the story until the final battle is hardly a villain at all. Knowing, or at least dropping ever more revealing hints as to what you're up against and why you should defeat it besides the generic "that's what good guys do" is an important part of a fantasy adventure.

FFIII: Zande wasn't even the final villain, but although the world's problems during the course of the game could be traced back to him, we know almost nothing about him. He held a grudge because he was gifted with his mentor's humanity. It's not a bad idea, but it's given no more than a few sentences of dialogue in the entire story. On top of that, he was being gleefully backed by the Cloud of Darkness, the real villain, who wanted the Void to overcome everything. Again, not a bad idea, and certainly the Dark Warriors concept was cool, but there is like one sentence devoted to her(?) until after you kill Zande, and by then there is less than an hour of game left to even care whether you defeat her or not besides just getting the game over with.

FFIV: Continues the mistake FFIII made with its main villain...Golbez was cool, but springing Zemus on you 80% of the way into the game as the dude who was controling Golbez is shoddy storytelling. It's like "SURPRISE TWIST!!! WHO YOU THOUGHT WAS THE VILLAIN IS REALLY NOT!" :rolleyes2 :mad: :mad2: I'm sure the people who developed the story for Square thought they were being immensely clever. Perhaps back in the day it was, but in retrospect it's a bit of a joke. Zemus's entire development as a villain comes in the minute or so before you fight him, and the gist of it is "mwhahahaha I'm EEEEEVIL. You'll never destroy me! mwhahahaha!" :rolleyes2 Okay, I know FuSoYa explains about the Lunarians and what not, but there's not enough depth to Zemus to reason that he had any other purpose behind assaulting Earth other than being a 100% evil racist.

Leon in FFII. There's a thread about this in the FFII forum. If it wasn't mind control, which I believe it wasn't, why did he become the Dark Knight in the first place? The game hardly addresses it. Also, the quest to obtain the Ultima Magic was a major contrivance to get you to do a dungeon, considering the spell is not really necessary. Actually the entire game is filled with contrived kidnappings, secret all-important items, places you can only go with a certain vehicle, etc. etc. that just come up to get you to go do some quest to continue the story. I'm a big fan of the overall plot, but by FFII they still hadn't quite figured out how to incorporate plot points into the story without the standard "fetch" or "rescue" quests.

The World of Ruin in FFVI was basically nothing more than a bunch of side quests and optional leveling/skill acquisition. After you learn that Kefka sits in his tower zapping things with his death ray there's almost zero development along the main plot line. You just go face him whenever you're ready. Ho-hum. (Kefka rocks though)

[YTDN]

The World of Ruin in FFVI was basically nothing more than a bunch of side quests and optional leveling/skill acquisition. After you learn that Kefka sits in his tower zapping things with his death ray there's almost zero development along the main plot line. You just go face him whenever you're ready. Ho-hum. (Kefka rocks though)

Well how do you develop a story when the world's been blown up?

Really though, there wasn't much anyone could do with the plot in the WoR, except go any kick Kefka's ass.

[Slothy]

The World of Ruin in FFVI was basically nothing more than a bunch of side quests and optional leveling/skill acquisition. After you learn that Kefka sits in his tower zapping things with his death ray there's almost zero development along the main plot line. You just go face him whenever you're ready. Ho-hum. (Kefka rocks though)

No there's not much development of the main plot, but then, what could there have been? Kefka's already destroyed the world, how much more main plot development can there be after that aside from killing him? The WOR still had a ton of character development though, and considering half of the appeal of the story is the characters, I don't think anyone can see it as a bad thing overall.

[Ender]

No there's not much development of the main plot, but then, what could there have been? Kefka's already destroyed the world, how much more main plot development can there be after that aside from killing him? The WOR still had a ton of character development though, and considering half of the appeal of the story is the characters, I don't think anyone can see it as a bad thing overall.

Yeah, there was plenty of character development. I can't fault it for that.

The problem is that the Light of Judgement rendered any resistance to Kefka null and void. It was an arbitrary decision by the game's designers to make him basically all powerful and thus eliminating any chance for further plot development.

Take away Kefka's death ray, but still leave him immensely powerful and you can have a story. Why? Because Kefka's reach no longer extends everywhere you run into a situation similar to the WoB where he needs allies to secure his dominion over the entire world. The Emperor needed an army, but Kefka, being super-powerful, could have employed super-powerful evil henchman/monsters/demons/etc. At the same time, this allows for resistance to spring up. And a clever storyteller could have done it without rehashing the entire WoB storyline. Of course there are some other difficulties, those being that due to the number of playable characters and their own development the game was insanely long as it was already. Still, after acquiring my party members in the WoR, I spent several hours leveling in the Dinosaur Forest but felt like the story had died. There was no reason or plot point that forced me to finally head to Kefka's Tower other than that he was a supreme jerk and I wanted to beat the game.

[Wolf Kanno]

I always felt the WoR was really more about the characters themselves, being developed. Setzer, Gau, and Strago become more than just filler in your party. The story during the WoR was basically to find your allies and get your revenge on Kefka. I think trying to add another resistance or Kefka needing more minions would have just convulated the plot at a time where doing so would be pointless. It would have felt "tacked on" so I prefer the way it was handled but we all have our opinions on it.

As for your thoughts on FFII, I completely agree. I'm in the camp of "Leon choosing the empires side on his own" So it never really made since to me. I usually just use the excuse of "it was early in the genres life so we can accept it" but honestly. It was poorly written. ;)

[LazarCotoron]

I have two of these.

Marche, in FFTA, killed my story. He made choices I simply could not condone, whether I examined them morally or personally.

And then there's FFIV. Where to begin the pain? Let's see..
FFIV's god awful terrible translation? √
Black-mailed Dark Knight turns Paladin? √
Badass Dragoon ditches me with those losers? √
Rosa*? √
Spoony Bard*? √
Palom and Perom dieing on me when I needed them to make my party not suck? √ and 10-4, good buddy!

*Yes, Rosa and Edward are so bad that they count as seperate reasons.

Yep. FFIV got the "This game sucks and I hate it" treatment and was never heard from again. What can I say, sometimes clay pigeons are made of plastic.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Just about every game in the series reaches a point where the main plot stops progressing and your options are limited to either entering the final dungeon or doing side-quests. In FFVI, the birth of the World of Ruin is that point. You should appreciate it for its side-quests, which go well above and beyond those of other games in terms of size and scope, not judge it by criteria it was never meant to fulfill.

[Wolf Kanno]

And then there's FFIV. Where to begin the pain? Let's see..
FFIV's god awful terrible translation? √
Black-mailed Dark Knight turns Paladin? √
Badass Dragoon ditches me with those losers? √
Rosa*? √
Spoony Bard*? √
Palom and Perom dieing on me when I needed them to make my party not suck? √ and 10-4, good buddy!

*Yes, Rosa and Edward are so bad that they count as seperate reasons.



Your party gets better (though I still would have preferred Yang over Edge). You should keep playing through until the end. You get Rydia back and though Kain continues to be an ass for awhile he eventually joins you for good. I can't help for Rosa, but at least she stops talking after awhile and you can pretend she's just some mute White mage.;)