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Final Fantasy's Lost Translation, Greatest Hits
nixon66 writes "You may have seen the 'lost' Final Fantasy game, the Japanese Final Fantasy II for NES, debut in the U.S. as part of the recent Final Fantasy Origins PlayStation re-release, but interestingly, Square did try to localize the game much earlier. Lost Levels has a new feature up about the abandoned translation of Final Fantasy II for the NES back in 1991. They talk with the translators, Kaoru Moriyama and Ted Woolsey, about the factors that led to Final Fantasy IV for SNES being called Final Fantasy II in the States." Elsewhere, RPGamer reports that four SquareEnix PlayStation 1 titles have just been re-released as Greatest Hits for a $19.99 price point, including Final Fantasy Chronicles, Final Fantasy Anthology, Vagrant Story and Xenogears, and they clarify: "Final Fantasy Anthology includes Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy III), while Final Fantasy Chronicles contains Final Fantasy IV (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy II) and Chrono Trigger."
The Fan translation by Neo Demiforce was done well as was FF3.
The translation community has had these games for years. Why it makes "such a story now" lands a question mark on me.. unless Square paid slashdot for advertising.
The author seems a bit surprised that you can play the game from start to finish in the form it's in, which isn't too odd, as the localization is just editing text areas normally, not program code.
It's nice the other two-packs are greatest hits now, as they were hard to find for a while.
It is a pity that FF3 will probably not see US release ever. A two-pack with it and Secret of Mana would be nice.
and they clarify: "Final Fantasy Anthology includes Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy III), while Final Fantasy Chronicles contains Final Fantasy IV (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy II) and Chrono Trigger."
I'm more confused than ever... I'm going to create my own language, so that they can translate all these buggers in order and I won't have to put up with this. Until new games come out at least...
Yes I love III too. VII is not bad, but VIII is pure crap.
So when is there going to be a distributed computing project to computer the number scheme between the releases of the US and Japanese versions of the game? Frankly I'm just confused. (doesn't usually take much)
I agree. VI was awesome. VII was okay. VIII was crap. I was unbelievably hard and I'm still trying to beat it. IX reminded me of VII, but with better characters. X was an interactive movie. And I'm installing XI as we speak.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Anyone else notice the ROM linked to at the bottom. That can't be very legal even if the game was never officially released...
unf.
And I'm installing XI as we speak.
No!!!!!! Don't do it!!!!!! The game kicks ASS and i barely found enough time to finish writ...
I hate VIII. Somehow I wound up in the final dungeon at level 20 and now it just sucks. Give me interactive movie any day over sucky gameplay and dungeons that you can get into irreguardless of level and cannot leave.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Fan site FFCompendium.com has details (translated from an RPGamer image) of a Final Fantasy game that went into immediate development following the success of Final Fantasy IIIj in Japan. This was tenatively going to be called Final Fantasy IV and actually be on the Famicon, but it was abandoned and the true Final Fantasy IV was developed for the Super Famicon instead. Quite some interesting details, it looked like they were really going to push the envelope with this and the internet community now dubs it Final Fantasy 3.5. All details here: http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/ff3half.shtml
Asia gets an American PC game like once a year (Koreans are still playing Counter-Strike and Starcraft while Americans drool over upcoming Half-Life 2 and Doom 3). Vice versa, American rarely gets the non-ultra-catered-mainstream console game from Japan (Vib Ribbon, we recently got Dance Dance Revolution like 3 years late, and FINALLY Final Fantasy II and III for the NES)
I've searched a few online game vendors, including EBGames, Best Buy, and Amazon, and none of them have Xenogears. If it's in stores today, where do I get it?
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We never managed to get a transaltion of Chrono Trigger for the PS, never mind Chrono Cross. Trigger was one of the best RPGs IMHO made, while I would have loved to play Cross.
Square actually gives us an even worse deal than USA gamers, even though there shouldn't be a problem with the language...
I wound up at the final dungeon at a level fitting enough to beat the final boss, but the story was so uninvolving that I ended up going "Meh, who gives a fuck?" and stopped playing.
On eBay, for about $50. I think they're going to be really angry with me when they find this out.
To hell with Final Fantasy. Chrono Trigger is the best thing on that anthology.
Except the loading times are an embarassment to Square. The FF and CT ports are the only classic games where I can get a soda while waiting for a battle to start, or for the status screen to come up.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
And you can exit the castle by going to the area before the castles gate, there should be a few huge chains, go up to them and press the action button until you jump over into a doorway. Then you'll be on the world map, the Ragnarok is somewhere (can't remember where, sorry). After that, travel to the Island Closest to Heaven/Hell (They are on the left-most and right-most tips, respectively) and get all the high magic. You can also find most of the GFs you may have missed, so really, you are in a great position.
If my recommendations were too vague, just check out www.gamefaqs.com, it should have plenty of info.
Nah, CT was the only one that had a problem with that. The FF ports simply had a problem with crapped out sound quality from the original. Oh, and whoever made the decision to make Faris in FFV say "ARRR!" over and over again should be SHOT!
I still think it great that a game made originally in 8-bits 15 years ago, is now capable of being played on one of the most modern consoles (PS2). Not only does the game still exist, and still have some of the odd quirks, or secrets, and a bit of originality, but it has now become a greatest hit. As for Anthology, I still think FFVI was is the best in the series. When it came out on the PS1, I liked the cinematic sequences, the art, and the cancel button doubling your walking speed. But I was annoyed with the loading time involved. I wonder why the SNES was able to show Sabin's Bum Rush attack with enough FPS to almost put someone in Epileptic shock, yet on the PS1, you barely notice the flashing... Though I am concerned about one thing, one of the greatest things was the music CD that came with the original Anthology. I wonder if the Greatest Hits version will have the audio CD?
I hope they fix the bug in Anthology so that it works properly on a PS2.
Oddly enough, I never noticed the load times in FF1 on Origins. They weren't any worse than, say, Xenogears' load times for the battles or status screen...
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
We did get DDR, not late but chopped up song wise. None of the NA DDR releases have had anywhere the number of songs in the Japan version, due to licencing. It's well known that licencing of songs is a big, sweaty, nasty bitch. That's my DDR Max 2 was delayed in Canada -- licencing!
As for FF3 for the FAMICOM, it has never been released in North America. Origins gives you 1 and 2, Chronicles adds 4, Anthology gives 5 and 6, and FF 7, 8, and 9 were already on the PS1 -- 3 is not listed because it was never ported (sadly).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It was a bitch to get a copy of Xenogears, then I stumbled on a MINT one at the very Gamestop I work at (surprisingly no employees jumped on it at a $30 CHEAP price tag) and then a COMPLETE FF:Anthology (finding one that still had it's CD was tough). Now the greatest hits comes out and it makes it a pain in the ass to know the difference between the good original releases and the crappy standout green spine disks in my collection. It just made my effort in finding a good FFChronicles that much more difficult, thankfully that's the last one I need to completely my PS1 collection of Square games (the best being Einhander).
But when you've played the original, you don't WANT load times where there weren't any. It boggles the MIND!
Other than this site and it's source site the information on the price drop doesn't exist anywhere. There are no postings of this news anywhere on any of square-enix's web sites. No retailers have mentioned this at all. Although this isn't exactly solid evidence, it's a good indicator that this story is a complete and total fabrication.
There's a reason why it never crossed the ocean.
The battle system COMPLETELY broken.
1. Every single enemy in the game is either too easy to be bothered with or will kick your ass instantly - there's NEVER an intermediate, even with bosses.
2. The "no exp" system means that in order to grow your characters, you actually have to force them to stab themselves with their own swords in order to build their stats to even decent levels. Nothing is more hilarious than getting into a battle of imps, killing all but one, then spending a good five minutes telling your characters to stab themselves just to build stats. It gets even worse with the "chge" spell...
3. If you wear armor your magic will always be hilariously pathetic (even though it won't say so in the stats) - and for the final dungeon, it's actually better to strip off your clothes and run through the final dungeon buck naked because your armor will actually slow you down enough so you get hit 11 times every time the enemies attack, and it's better to get hit twice with no armor on than 11 times with armor on. I was taking like 2000 damage a turn on a character with a full set of Gengi equipment, then on a lark I decided to see what would happen if I stripped him naked, and suddenly the damage he received dropped to 400. WTF?
4. Weapons and Magic operate on a proficiency scale. The problem is that the game's glitched so that you can actually select, cancel, select cancel to build the proficency without actually wasting your turn. "Well fine then, don't cheat." Actually, you literally have to do this because building up even a decent swordskill would require swinging your sword something like 800 times or something, and mastering takes like 2000 times. That's for ONE KIND OF WEAPON - there's like 8. And you're totally hopeless with a weapon until you hit level 4 proficency. Spells don't even really do ANYTHING until you hit insane proficiency either.
5. Your 4th character will always be totally useless because you go through god knows how many over the course of the game, and they're always ridiculously undermatched compared to the enemies. And you can't select-cancel with him/her. Great.