Even a five year old could understand THAT.

[Loony BoB]

With the criticism FFXIII has come in for recently due to people finding the storyline confusing and complicated, which FF game do you think had the clearest storyline? Just talking the main series, here.

Feel free to discuss the storylines of the various games (mark spoilers with the game name - eg [spoiler</>="ff1 spoiler"]ff1spoiler[</>/spoiler] which becomes ff1 spoilerff1spoiler) and which you think are more or less complicated than others.

[kotora]

FFXIII had a complicated storyline? I can understand the confusing part, but it lacked any substance so I don't see how it can be called 'complicated'.

Anyway, I'd say FFX. Your goal is pretty much clear-cut from the beginning and it doesn't stray from it aside from one twist.

[Slothy]

I voted VI because it's my favourite, but really any game pre-VII was pretty clear about what was going on all of the time. Probably in part due to the fact that the space on the cartridges was so limited that it made sure they kept things clear and to the point a lot of the time. I mean you can sum up the overall story of FFVI as FFVI spoilerevil empire using magic to take over the world. Fight evil empire. Kefka destroys the world. Fight Kefka. Mind you the straight forward nature of the overall plot isn't all that made it clear. It also helped that what you were doing and where you were going typically had a clearly explained purpose that made sense in the context of the story.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Not the first game by a long shot, oddly enough.

[Mo-Nercy]

I think FFX had a pretty clear-cut storyline. As kotora has said, the two key protagonists in Tidus and Yuna are unwavering in their goals. And there aren't any spanners thrown into the works until the end, at which point, the player sort of already knew what the twist was going to be.

[Karifean]

I think FFXIII's was pretty easy, all you had to do was read through the datalogs when you were asked to.

[qwertysaur]

FF VII appears on the poll twice

[LunarWeaver]

I suppose the flowery language put some shiny ? on it, but I found Final Fantasy XII pretty straightforward. You had your goal and did it and then it ended.

[No.78]

FFV or FFIII I think.

I suppose the flowery language put some shiny ? on it, but I found Final Fantasy XII pretty straightforward. You had your goal and did it and then it ended.

I was pretty confused from start to finish, lol. Maybe I'm just dumb...

[demondude]

I was going to vote for FFVIII as a joke but the poll sucks. :P

[Goldenboko]

I always felt VI's was straightforward. "Bad Empire Vs. Rebels -> Group of People Vs. Madman". DONE!

[No.78]

Why is 10 winning? I thought the whole dream summoning cycle of death stuff was reasonably complicated. You couldn't easily explain it to someone, let's put it that way.

[VeloZer0]

This is going to be a fun thread to skim
I would like to point out that any story can be boiled down to: bad guy wants to do X, heroes stop him. Such simplifications can be applied to any game to defend ones preference and are of no use.

FFI
Time loop? Though not mind numbingly difficult it blew way over my head when I first played FFI, mostly because of how simple a story I had been experiencing up to that point. Most definately not simple.


FFIII
The story was fairly simple, but threw in a few plot points that deviated from the norm. The most difficult points to grasp would be why the gift of mortality would be considered the greatest gift of all, and that the World of Dark wasn't anymore evil than the world of Light, and the consequences of Light overwhelming Darkness were just as dire as Darkness overwhelming Light.


FFIV
FFIV's story was very involved and epic, but there wasn't anything difficult to conceptualize. I would say that the story was very easy to understand.


FFV
I haven't played it in a few years because I've been waiting for FFV DS, so I'm a little rusty on the fine details. Understanding Extedeath was a tree was something I knew a few people somehow missed, as well as the nature of the void. Other than that the story was fairly straightforward.


FFVI
Thinking about it, the strength of FFVI was characters not plot. The plot I believe was very good, but it is the characters who make the game. The story was very simple to understand, it was the more subtle character emotions that were harder to understand. The whole Celes cliff scene totally went over my head when I first played it, I though she was just upset and went to do some cliff jumping to blow off some steam.

Way to miss out on the most powerful scene of the game.
...
Don't laugh at me!


FFVII,VIII and IX
Come on, are you joking?

FFX
In FFX the goal was very clear the entire way and did not change. However, as it was noted earlier the whole Zanarkand/dream thing was a little bit to get your head around.


FFXII
I thought the whole plot to FFXII was brutally simple and easy to understand, but a lot of people seem to find it to be a little hard to follow. I attribute this to it being the first one that had a little more focu on politics. Imo, the politics involved in the game are certainly a step above average FF fare, (which isn't saying much), but still incredibly simple.


FFXIII
The plot of FFXIII was very simple, just hard to understand due to lack of explanation. A.k.a. it wasn't hard to understand because it was complicated, but poorly told.


And, after taking time to reflect on all titles, the winner is FFIV for not having anything that is out of the ordinary to understand.

[Slothy]

FFVIThinking about it, the strength of FFVI was characters not plot. The plot I believe was very good, but it is the characters who make the game. The story was very simple to understand, it was the more subtle character emotions that were harder to understand. The whole Celes cliff scene totally went over my head when I first played it, I though she was just upset and went to do some cliff jumping to blow off some steam.

Way to miss out on the most powerful scene of the game.
...
Don't laugh at me!

It's been a long time since I played the SNES version of FFVI, but I'm pretty sure the translation in that one glossed over it to deliberately make it kind of unclear due to Nintendo's censorship at the time. If you missed it then you're probably not the only one. I don't think I picked up on it at the time either (mind you I was 9).

[Vermachtnis]

V, the most complicated thing that happened was ExDeath hiding himself as a splinter in the butt of a little girl.