It's a Japanese RPG, with all the elements you expect (linear main plot, cuteness in spades). However, character recruitment and development is more open than in many JRPGs.
(Heehee, the first time I tried to type "JRPG", it came out as "JPEG". Fingers on autopilot!)
At the beginning of the game, you choose whether to play as the male or female lead. Some events play out differently depending on your choice. At least one secondary character is only recruitable if you play as the girl.
Recruiting some characters closes the door on others. If you recruit Ashton, you can't recruit Opera. And unless you recruit Opera, you can't recruit Ernest. Furthermore, the characters aren't just given to you; you have to explore a bit and pay attention to NPC hints in order to find some of them.
When you enter a town, the characters all split up to go shopping. You control only the lead character, and can wander around the town looking for your friends. Sometimes, an extended conversation happens which can affect the relationship between the two characters. This can ultimately affect the game's ending. (There's no guarantee that the male and female leads end up as a couple).
You can also teach skills such as cooking, alchemy, metalworking etc. to different characters. That's not compulsory; you could forego that aspect of the game completely and just concentrate on battle skills if you want. It just adds another dimension to the character customization.
Actually, I'm playing through Chrono Cross (yes, for the first time), and I'm finding it a much better story line than Chrono Trigger had.
It gets very, very complex. There's quite a bit too much plot, in my opinion. I had to hit GameFAQs for an explanation just to make sense of it all.
Once I'd read the GameFAQs story guide two or three times and got my head round it, it made sense, and actually tied up in quite an elegant way. But it didn't seem that way while I was actually playing the game. For that reason, I found Chrono Trigger more satisfying in terms of storytelling.
Chrono Cross's battle system rules all, though.
FF6 still rocks, though.
Too right. Best characterization of any of the FFs (Celes Chere is my favourite FF character ever), and an elegant story that, while relatively simple compared with the PSX-generation FFs, held the player's attention (pacing issues in the second half notwithstanding), and never completely lost the plot like FFVIII and FFIX did towards the end.
I usually go with the default names as given in the story. However, this isn't always possible: when I played the PSX remake of the original Final Fantasy, I discovered there were no default names.
I asked a couple of friends who know bits of Japanese for suitable names for my characters (a knight, a thief, a black mage and a white mage). The requirements were that the words had to sound like names, and had to be related to the character class in some way.
The names I went with were:
knight: "Shido" (meaning "chivalry");
thief: "Sesshu" (meaning "larceny");
black mage: "Amaya" (meaning "night rain");
white mage: "Seika" (meaning "hymn").
"Amaya" kinda breaks the second requirement; but it sounds good, and a word connected with the night is still befitting of a black mage.
If I ever play another RPG with no default names, I'll do the same thing again.
Yoshitaka Amano did the character designs for the Nintendo-generation Final Fantasy games, and also for FFIX, the last of the FFs on the original Playstation. His concept art has a delicate, flowing, romantic quality that is quite unlike most videogame concept art, and very different from the more down-to-earth designs that Tetsuya Nomura did for FFVII, VIII and X.
If you've never seen any Amano art, Google for something like "yoshitaka amano final fantasy" and have a look.
This is more like taking crayolas to a print of a Rembrandt which you own. You're altering your own copy as you see fit, but the original work is unaffected.
Not as convoluted as the PSX-gen FFs, but better for it. It's simple, yet interesting. Elegant, even.
with fantastically deep/moving/cool characters
Overall, the best characters of any FF. Sure, other FFs have their highlights (Cloud and Aeris in VII, Vivi in IX), but none have as many interesting, well-developed characters as VI. Celes is my favourite; I enjoyed thinking back on the story, remembering the gradual changes in her personality, from cold-hearted general to passionate freedom fighter. Her scene in the opera house is one of the most memorable scenes in any game I've played.
Of all the FF's, VI is the one that I spent the most time thinking about when I wasn't playing it, due entirely to the beautifully realised characters.
And the ending! More than 20 minutes of glorious reward at the end of that amazing battle against the statues and Kefka, with screen time given to every character.
And it's exactly the ending you want. The story is resolved in the manner that the game was leading up to. There are no weird plot twists out of left field that diminish the ending's satisfaction. (Plus, if you're playing the PSX version, you get a bonus FMV with a lovely arrangement of Celes' theme as background music).
I see what you're saying about the FFVIII levelling-up system; thing is, I'm a comuplsive leveller-upper, so I finished with two characters on L100 and the others on L98/L99 anyway. (And the only reason they weren't on L100 was to avoid getting splattered by the L5 Death spell). Even with highest-level enemies, the outrageous stat gains provided by the Junction system made the game too easy. Oh, and the Aura spell (providing limit breaks on demand) is cheap beyond belief. Renzokuken!
FFI, a classic, but not oh so great, but still love it.
I'm playing it at the moment; got the FF Origins compilation a few weeks ago. It's interesting as a history lesson, but kinda lacking compared with the later FFs due to the almost total lack of story and characters. Twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonderful thing, I know; it was revolutionary when it first came out.
Haven't played FFII or FFIII, so can't comment on those.
FFVI, nice, but I don't really like beeing stuck with the same classes.
Having come to the FF series late in life, the thing that struck me about IV was the difficulty. It's a shock to the system after the likes of FFVII. Nevertheless, it taught me the value of taking time out to level up, which was a good preparation for FFI (which I am playing on "normal" mode, not "easy"). Though FFIV is quite a few people's favourite, I wasn't so impressed with it; again, this is a result of coming to it wih hindsight, knowing what the FF series would develop into.
FFV. awesome! the best SNES FF game, lots of different classes and combinations.
I love the job system! That's what carries this game, IMO. A lot of people say this is the least good SNES-gen FF, and I don't know why; the story and characters are no worse than FFIV's, and the job system makes it a far more fun and strategic game to play. I was dreading the final battle, as I'd heard that X-Death was the toughest FF final boss, but he really didn't give me any trouble; I think that you just have to pick your job classes and abilities sensibly. Zeromus and Kefka were both tougher than X-Death, IMHO.
FFVI, this one is another classic, it's incredible you can role play your characters via status raising espers, that's nice.
This is my favourite SNES-gen FF. The characters are wonderfully developed (Celes is one of my top three favourite FF characters, along with Aeris and Vivi), the story is fairly simple, but interesting, and very nicely told (making it possibly the best FF story of all), and Ted Woolsey's script is a treat. The Esper system is good because it ties directly into the storyline; the summoned monsters have a reason for being there, unlike (say) FFVII, where they're just "there", and don't make a great deal of sense.
FFVII was really cool, nice ability system, I'd love to be able to be able to do more combos like slots connected to 2 or more other slots.
I feel almost blasphemous saying anything bad about FFVII, given its now-legendary status in the history of gaming. Still, here goes: the story is good, but overcomplicated, and the whole techno-dystopia thing leaves me a bit cold; and the characters are less well-developed than FFVI's, with the exceptions of Cloud and Aeris. Even Tifa, cool as she is, serves only to help us understand Cloud's backstory. It's nonetheless a fun game to play; the Materia system is almost as good as the job system, though it's a bit too easy to create godlike characters (just load everyone up with HP Plus and MP Plus, and watch the fireworks).
FFVIII, already talked about that, this one is bad!
Nah, it's not bad; it's just different:-)
FFIX... really nice, learning abilities when using weapons is nice, but it isn't really customizable.
It has the least convoluted story of any of the PSX-gen FFs, despite going a bit loopy towards the end (a little more plot than it needed), and the most sympathetic characters. Zid
The FFVIII magic system wasn't so bad once you'd acquired enough consumable items to refine into magic. You could take a half-hour break from the story, play cards against NPCs, refine the cards you won into items, and refine the items into magic. Random battle draw-a-thons were still sometimes necessary, but the alternative methods of acquiring magic broke up the monotony somewhat.
I've got no complaints with a return to the draw system if there are other ways to acquire magic besides drawing.
Incidentally: when I first heard about FF:CC's use of magic crystals/stones which could be combined to alter their effects, the first thing that came to mind was FFVII's Materia system.
When I install software from source, I install it into its own directory in/opt, to keep everything together, and make it easy to uninstall.
The problem with that is that one needs to put/opt/foo/bin,/opt/bar/bin etc. into one's path and/opt/foo/man,/opt/bar/man etc. into the manpath to be able to run the programs. This is a right royal pain. So I use Stow to set up symlinks from/usr/local, pointing into the application's directory in/opt. Creating all those symlinks by hand (and deleting them all after deleting a piece of software) would be tedious and error-prone; having Stow do it for me saves time and effort.
That's all. Nothing more complex than that. This isn't "package management" at all; it's just symlink management. But it's blooming useful symlink management.
For Europeans, Synsoniq is a good place to find imported Japanese game soundtracks. They have a big selection, and their delivery is pretty speedy (to the UK, at least).
Frontier: Elite 2. I lost weeks of my life to that game when I was in school.
It was 1 disk big (1.44 floppy).
I had the Amiga version, which fitted on a single double-density floppy (~837KiB, due to the Amiga's formatting scheme). IIRC, there were two disks in the box, but the game only took one of them; the other contained a load of sample saved games.
The Frontier binary was only a few hundred kilobytes in size. Loaded in one load; no multiloading, no overlays.
Our company's naming convention for software is words to do with ice. Our mail server is called "igloo"; our web tools are "gelid"; our network monitoring system is "icecube". There's no reason to the names, other than being ice-related.
The Unix philosophy is "do one thing, and do it well". This phone-cum-kitchen-sink does lots of things; whether it does any of them well remains to be seen.
I like my landline phone. It allows me to make phone calls, and performs that task extremely well.
I got stick from my classmates for being different from them in virtually every way (interests, religion, politics, no good at sport).
It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd handled it properly; instead, I went into stereotypical nerd mode, acted all superior, and copped a load more stick as a result. (Doesn't excuse the bullying, of course; but I could have handled it better and saved myself some grief. 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing).
S'common as muck; certainly not a very interesting name; but I really don't like being called anything else. I don't like it being abbreviated to "Steve"; and I don't use an online pseudonym, because being called anything other than "Stephen" just feels wrong.
My parents didn't give me a middle name, because middle names are unnecessary. Although neither of my parents are geeks, not giving me any unnecessary names was geekishly efficient of them, I think:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Japanese RPG, with all the elements you expect (linear main plot, cuteness in spades). However, character recruitment and development is more open than in many JRPGs.
(Heehee, the first time I tried to type "JRPG", it came out as "JPEG". Fingers on autopilot!)
At the beginning of the game, you choose whether to play as the male or female lead. Some events play out differently depending on your choice. At least one secondary character is only recruitable if you play as the girl.
Recruiting some characters closes the door on others. If you recruit Ashton, you can't recruit Opera. And unless you recruit Opera, you can't recruit Ernest. Furthermore, the characters aren't just given to you; you have to explore a bit and pay attention to NPC hints in order to find some of them.
When you enter a town, the characters all split up to go shopping. You control only the lead character, and can wander around the town looking for your friends. Sometimes, an extended conversation happens which can affect the relationship between the two characters. This can ultimately affect the game's ending. (There's no guarantee that the male and female leads end up as a couple).
You can also teach skills such as cooking, alchemy, metalworking etc. to different characters. That's not compulsory; you could forego that aspect of the game completely and just concentrate on battle skills if you want. It just adds another dimension to the character customization.
-Stephen
C'mon mods, click the links before modding the comments...
nehpetS-
Actually, I'm playing through Chrono Cross (yes, for the first time), and I'm finding it a much better story line than Chrono Trigger had.
It gets very, very complex. There's quite a bit too much plot, in my opinion. I had to hit GameFAQs for an explanation just to make sense of it all.
Once I'd read the GameFAQs story guide two or three times and got my head round it, it made sense, and actually tied up in quite an elegant way. But it didn't seem that way while I was actually playing the game. For that reason, I found Chrono Trigger more satisfying in terms of storytelling.
Chrono Cross's battle system rules all, though.
FF6 still rocks, though.
Too right. Best characterization of any of the FFs (Celes Chere is my favourite FF character ever), and an elegant story that, while relatively simple compared with the PSX-generation FFs, held the player's attention (pacing issues in the second half notwithstanding), and never completely lost the plot like FFVIII and FFIX did towards the end.
-Stephen
I asked a couple of friends who know bits of Japanese for suitable names for my characters (a knight, a thief, a black mage and a white mage). The requirements were that the words had to sound like names, and had to be related to the character class in some way.
The names I went with were:
"Amaya" kinda breaks the second requirement; but it sounds good, and a word connected with the night is still befitting of a black mage.
If I ever play another RPG with no default names, I'll do the same thing again.
-Stephen
Yoshitaka Amano did the character designs for the Nintendo-generation Final Fantasy games, and also for FFIX, the last of the FFs on the original Playstation. His concept art has a delicate, flowing, romantic quality that is quite unlike most videogame concept art, and very different from the more down-to-earth designs that Tetsuya Nomura did for FFVII, VIII and X.
If you've never seen any Amano art, Google for something like "yoshitaka amano final fantasy" and have a look.
-Stephen
Your first point invalidates your second point.
This is more like taking crayolas to a print of a Rembrandt which you own. You're altering your own copy as you see fit, but the original work is unaffected.
-Stephen
Maybe someone could write a long, pontificating article on the subject. "Searching for JonKatz in the Post-Columbine Neo-Hellmouth" or something.
-Stephen
Shouldn't they have sent him a "cease and desist" letter first as a warning before lawyering him?
Oh, wait, that would have been the reasonable thing to do...
-Stephen
I always did think that the section at the back entitled "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" read more like "A Portrait of Eric S. Raymond".
-Stephen
Replace him with Harrison, and make the bill out of special paper that disintegrates after thirty days.
-Stephen
a fantastic plot
Not as convoluted as the PSX-gen FFs, but better for it. It's simple, yet interesting. Elegant, even.
with fantastically deep/moving/cool characters
Overall, the best characters of any FF. Sure, other FFs have their highlights (Cloud and Aeris in VII, Vivi in IX), but none have as many interesting, well-developed characters as VI. Celes is my favourite; I enjoyed thinking back on the story, remembering the gradual changes in her personality, from cold-hearted general to passionate freedom fighter. Her scene in the opera house is one of the most memorable scenes in any game I've played.
Of all the FF's, VI is the one that I spent the most time thinking about when I wasn't playing it, due entirely to the beautifully realised characters.
And the ending! More than 20 minutes of glorious reward at the end of that amazing battle against the statues and Kefka, with screen time given to every character.
And it's exactly the ending you want. The story is resolved in the manner that the game was leading up to. There are no weird plot twists out of left field that diminish the ending's satisfaction. (Plus, if you're playing the PSX version, you get a bonus FMV with a lovely arrangement of Celes' theme as background music).
-Stephen
I see what you're saying about the FFVIII levelling-up system; thing is, I'm a comuplsive leveller-upper, so I finished with two characters on L100 and the others on L98/L99 anyway. (And the only reason they weren't on L100 was to avoid getting splattered by the L5 Death spell). Even with highest-level enemies, the outrageous stat gains provided by the Junction system made the game too easy. Oh, and the Aura spell (providing limit breaks on demand) is cheap beyond belief. Renzokuken!
:-)
FFI, a classic, but not oh so great, but still love it.
I'm playing it at the moment; got the FF Origins compilation a few weeks ago. It's interesting as a history lesson, but kinda lacking compared with the later FFs due to the almost total lack of story and characters. Twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonderful thing, I know; it was revolutionary when it first came out.
Haven't played FFII or FFIII, so can't comment on those.
FFVI, nice, but I don't really like beeing stuck with the same classes.
Having come to the FF series late in life, the thing that struck me about IV was the difficulty. It's a shock to the system after the likes of FFVII. Nevertheless, it taught me the value of taking time out to level up, which was a good preparation for FFI (which I am playing on "normal" mode, not "easy"). Though FFIV is quite a few people's favourite, I wasn't so impressed with it; again, this is a result of coming to it wih hindsight, knowing what the FF series would develop into.
FFV. awesome! the best SNES FF game, lots of different classes and combinations.
I love the job system! That's what carries this game, IMO. A lot of people say this is the least good SNES-gen FF, and I don't know why; the story and characters are no worse than FFIV's, and the job system makes it a far more fun and strategic game to play. I was dreading the final battle, as I'd heard that X-Death was the toughest FF final boss, but he really didn't give me any trouble; I think that you just have to pick your job classes and abilities sensibly. Zeromus and Kefka were both tougher than X-Death, IMHO.
FFVI, this one is another classic, it's incredible you can role play your characters via status raising espers, that's nice.
This is my favourite SNES-gen FF. The characters are wonderfully developed (Celes is one of my top three favourite FF characters, along with Aeris and Vivi), the story is fairly simple, but interesting, and very nicely told (making it possibly the best FF story of all), and Ted Woolsey's script is a treat. The Esper system is good because it ties directly into the storyline; the summoned monsters have a reason for being there, unlike (say) FFVII, where they're just "there", and don't make a great deal of sense.
FFVII was really cool, nice ability system, I'd love to be able to be able to do more combos like slots connected to 2 or more other slots.
I feel almost blasphemous saying anything bad about FFVII, given its now-legendary status in the history of gaming. Still, here goes: the story is good, but overcomplicated, and the whole techno-dystopia thing leaves me a bit cold; and the characters are less well-developed than FFVI's, with the exceptions of Cloud and Aeris. Even Tifa, cool as she is, serves only to help us understand Cloud's backstory. It's nonetheless a fun game to play; the Materia system is almost as good as the job system, though it's a bit too easy to create godlike characters (just load everyone up with HP Plus and MP Plus, and watch the fireworks).
FFVIII, already talked about that, this one is bad!
Nah, it's not bad; it's just different
FFIX... really nice, learning abilities when using weapons is nice, but it isn't really customizable.
It has the least convoluted story of any of the PSX-gen FFs, despite going a bit loopy towards the end (a little more plot than it needed), and the most sympathetic characters. Zid
The FFVIII magic system wasn't so bad once you'd acquired enough consumable items to refine into magic. You could take a half-hour break from the story, play cards against NPCs, refine the cards you won into items, and refine the items into magic. Random battle draw-a-thons were still sometimes necessary, but the alternative methods of acquiring magic broke up the monotony somewhat.
I've got no complaints with a return to the draw system if there are other ways to acquire magic besides drawing.
Incidentally: when I first heard about FF:CC's use of magic crystals/stones which could be combined to alter their effects, the first thing that came to mind was FFVII's Materia system.
-Stephen
I pronounce it "wuh wuh wuh" :-)
-Stephen
When I install software from source, I install it into its own directory in /opt, to keep everything together, and make it easy to uninstall.
/opt/foo/bin, /opt/bar/bin etc. into one's path and /opt/foo/man, /opt/bar/man etc. into the manpath to be able to run the programs. This is a right royal pain. So I use Stow to set up symlinks from /usr/local, pointing into the application's directory in /opt. Creating all those symlinks by hand (and deleting them all after deleting a piece of software) would be tedious and error-prone; having Stow do it for me saves time and effort.
The problem with that is that one needs to put
That's all. Nothing more complex than that. This isn't "package management" at all; it's just symlink management. But it's blooming useful symlink management.
-Stephen
For Europeans, Synsoniq is a good place to find imported Japanese game soundtracks. They have a big selection, and their delivery is pretty speedy (to the UK, at least).
-Stephen
Elite 2: Final Frontiers I think it was called.
Frontier: Elite 2. I lost weeks of my life to that game when I was in school.
It was 1 disk big (1.44 floppy).
I had the Amiga version, which fitted on a single double-density floppy (~837KiB, due to the Amiga's formatting scheme). IIRC, there were two disks in the box, but the game only took one of them; the other contained a load of sample saved games.
The Frontier binary was only a few hundred kilobytes in size. Loaded in one load; no multiloading, no overlays.
-Stephen
Our company's naming convention for software is words to do with ice. Our mail server is called "igloo"; our web tools are "gelid"; our network monitoring system is "icecube". There's no reason to the names, other than being ice-related.
-Stephen
Slashdot is the trenches. Its down and dirty.
You must be in desperate need of subscription money if the only colo you can afford is in a muddy hole in Passchendaele...
-Stephen
The Unix philosophy is "do one thing, and do it well". This phone-cum-kitchen-sink does lots of things; whether it does any of them well remains to be seen.
I like my landline phone. It allows me to make phone calls, and performs that task extremely well.
-Stephen (no, I've never owned a mobile phone)
Um, there are people in the UK that are good at sport?
:-)
I was speaking comparatively
British athletes are about equivalent to American non-athletes. British non-athletes, like me, are about equivalent to American rocks.
-Stephen
I'm a UK nerd.
I got stick from my classmates for being different from them in virtually every way (interests, religion, politics, no good at sport).
It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd handled it properly; instead, I went into stereotypical nerd mode, acted all superior, and copped a load more stick as a result. (Doesn't excuse the bullying, of course; but I could have handled it better and saved myself some grief. 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing).
-Stephen
It would at least keep you from getting a username like "sw38947"
:-)
I usually pick "stephenw32768" as my user name: first name, last initial, and favourite number
-Stephen
S'common as muck; certainly not a very interesting name; but I really don't like being called anything else. I don't like it being abbreviated to "Steve"; and I don't use an online pseudonym, because being called anything other than "Stephen" just feels wrong.
:-)
My parents didn't give me a middle name, because middle names are unnecessary. Although neither of my parents are geeks, not giving me any unnecessary names was geekishly efficient of them, I think
-Stephen
You're just a resource to be exploited like a machine processing materials.
Indeed. Notice how personnel departments are never called "personnel" any more? S'always "human resources" nowadays.
-Stephen