LEAST favorite Final Fantasy location

[Forsaken Lover]

People hatin' on Mt. Gagazet? Um, what? It has possibly the best area music in any FF game ever. That alone easily keeps it from being one of the worst locations.

I will confess to the fact I didn't like the Zanarkand Dome however. I appreciate they were going for a more intense feeling or something but after Zanarkand proper's amazingly somber atmosphere, it just felt disappointing.

I'm gonna also add both Sandseas from FFXII. Just awful.

[Wolf Kanno]

Mt.Gagazet is an awful dungeon, because despite looking pretty and having some nice theme music it's largely a winding road littered with cutscenes that serve no purpose to the story, good lord you can't go five feet without accidentally activating another set of dialogue with the party that doesn't make any of them more interesting. I mean come on FFX, let me play the damn game.

[Pumpkin]

Mt.Gagazet is an awful dungeon, because despite looking pretty and having some nice theme music it's largely a winding road littered with cutscenes that serve no purpose to the story, good lord you can't go five feet without accidentally activating another set of dialogue with the party that doesn't make any of them more interesting. I mean come on FFX, let me play the damn game.

Oh yeah? Well, your face.

[I Took the Red Pill]

I particularly disliked going to The Moon in FFIV.

[Formalhaut]

Mt.Gagazet is an awful dungeon, because despite looking pretty and having some nice theme music it's largely a winding road littered with cutscenes that serve no purpose to the story, good lord you can't go five feet without accidentally activating another set of dialogue with the party that doesn't make any of them more interesting. I mean come on FFX, let me play the damn game.

Oh yeah? Well, your face.

I liked it, though I didn't particularly enjoy the long winding road section of Mt. Gagazet. What I did find about Mt Gagazet though was that their was less story, more build-up:

1. Mountain Gate: Story, Ronso hymn
2. Long winding trail that goes on forever
3. Summit: Seymour Battle
4. Lengthy and boring cavern puzzle...
5. Rather strange flashback with Tidus

Finish. Bear in mind the long sections drag on forever. This was actually my only complaint with the mountain though. You thought that was bad, the Calm Lands was worse for story. A huge plain, brief cut-scene in the centre, optional cavern of the fayth, and off you go to Mt.Gagazet!

[Loony BoB]

How anyone can objectively say that any location from VII onwards is worse than a random lengthy mine/cave dungeon in FFI through FFVI is beyond me. At least in 3D worlds the mines/caves can look different. Seriously.

I can understand abnormally high encounter rates, but if you're going to go down that road then I'll point to some rooms in early FF dungeons which had encounters for every few steps you took. Basically you had to avoid those rooms and not explore them unless you wanted to level up using them or something. Either way, those early FF dungeons were basically crap in every way I could imagine. I can't really blame SE for that, games of that era were restricted by game engines and graphical capabilities. But that doesn't mean that suddenly a beautiful landscape in one of the more modern games is suddenly worse.

It sounds to me like people are associating these locations with one-off plot devices or cutscenes rather than the locations themselves.

[Formalhaut]

How anyone can objectively say that any location from VII onwards is worse than a random lengthy mine/cave dungeon in FFI through FFVI is beyond me. At least in 3D worlds the mines/caves can look different. Seriously.

Simple. I haven't played any of those earlier games. I've no experiences with them, though I've heard horror stories.

[Jinx]

Mt. Gagazet's music is okay. Not great. Just okay. The scenery is kind of cool, but the encounter rate is ATROCIOUS. And because of the winding-ness of it, you often get turned around. CRASH. It's time for a battle. Come back. End up going the wrong way. CRASH. Battle. Turn around, fuuuuck. Same way AGAIN. CRASH!

You get my point.

Also, Calm Lands is boring and ugly.

[Formalhaut]

It's as if the world designers of FFX got lazy after awhile. Here's the location list in order:

Besaid: Lovely, picturesque, nice scenery, nice music...
Kilika: A reversal of fortune for tiny islands, the story-line hots up here
Luca: Nice port town, blitzball is abit naff, but the story is quite good
Mi'hen Highroad: Slightly long, but nice and pleasant
Mushroom Rock: Ominious, spooky, downcast... sets the scene for the doomed mission
Moonflow: Loved this area. Loved it

And then it starts going downhill...

Guadotown: Decent, very story-based and goes on for quite a long time
Thunder Plains: Long, annoying. The music doesn't really fit as well
Macalania: Quite nice I suppose. Encounter rate is something to be desired, and it does wind around abit.
Sanubia/Bikanel: Just desert, after desert, after desert....
Calm Lands: Dull and boring. Far too wide.
Mt.Gagazet: Decent, but encounter rate is atrocious and the path long-winding
Zanarkand: Finally get's it's act together.

[Jinx]

Macalania Forest and Moonflow are the two most beautiful areas in this game.

The music from Macalania Forest, just

;-;

[Formalhaut]

Actually, the Moonflow's background track "Movement in Green" is one of my favourites.

[Jinx]

Actually, the Moonflow's background track "Movement in Green" is one of my favourites.

Eh, too much like To Zanarkand for my taste.

[Formalhaut]

I just liked the instrument in it, sounds like bagpipes, though I'm not sure if it is bagpipes. Besides that, Suteki Da Ne is a great piece of event music!

[Wolf Kanno]

How anyone can objectively say that any location from VII onwards is worse than a random lengthy mine/cave dungeon in FFI through FFVI is beyond me. At least in 3D worlds the mines/caves can look different. Seriously.

I can understand abnormally high encounter rates, but if you're going to go down that road then I'll point to some rooms in early FF dungeons which had encounters for every few steps you took. Basically you had to avoid those rooms and not explore them unless you wanted to level up using them or something. Either way, those early FF dungeons were basically crap in every way I could imagine. I can't really blame SE for that, games of that era were restricted by game engines and graphical capabilities. But that doesn't mean that suddenly a beautiful landscape in one of the more modern games is suddenly worse.

It sounds to me like people are associating these locations with one-off plot devices or cutscenes rather than the locations themselves.

I can get behind the FFVII dungeons are blah cause only a handful of them really impressed me because as I've mentioned (I'm a broken record now) that the adment of 3D simply made dungeons more about how they look and lost a lot of their gameplay appeal, not the the first six games don't have troutty dungeon design at least somehwere but I do agree that barring the ShinRa-HQ and the Temple of the Ancients, I never felt like any of the other dungeons had lasting gameplay appeal. Even the Crater is a pretty subpar final dungeon in comparison to the four games before it.

As for why people trout on a dungeon, I feel its perfectly legitimate to nail it for story reasons, especially if its because the game either can't justify the place for story reasons of in the case of my Mt. Gagazet rant, I felt the story interfered with enjoying the location. Its a package a deal if you ask me.

[Roogle]

There was a dungeon in Final Fantasy XII that involved going up almost a hundred floors to retrieve an item. I can't remember what the dungeon was called because it was so tedious that I have tried to block it out of memory. That place had very little interaction between the characters or any story events at all while you were ascending the tower. So am I to believe that they could scale this tower in a few hours without stopping to rest with a campfire scene or something? The dungeon was horribly paced for me and it took me several hours to get through it without any promise of a cutscene or something to take a break with.