Dood, I killed your story!

[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.

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 . 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 . 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.

[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

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 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.