kradeelav | (no subject)

so i got both hades (the first one) and FF12 on the switch! long overdue for new games, especially with Nier:A being a bust. (Almost got star wars: republic commando and battlefront as well but want to finish the first two first lol). think i'm gonna tackle FF12 first. high hopes for this one, for a number of reasons:

- hot armored old gilf minor villain i'm 100% going to catcall when we fight him. incidentally, he - and this gifset- is the reason i'm starting the game lol.

- originally released in 2006. to me, peak Gaming™ was from 2003-2013 (gamecube/ps2/ps3 era). just enough polygons to be able to show whatever the devs wanted, but not too many to distract the player visually, and also very lean storytelling wise.... no fucking fluff with badly implemented online play / sidequests / open worlds / etc. e3 was still cool to watch and game hype legitimately enjoyable (man i remember watching the wii's e3 announcement T_T).

- all of the (spoiler free) mentions have been 'don't think of who you play as the main character, the story just happens to them' (AWESOME, i'm sick of protagonist-centric games). they've also said it's the FF that's most focused on nations and politics, which also - groovy, sounds like the radiant dawn of FF's. didn't need to sell me on this game any more. :D

- there's a sky pirate that some of my favorite creators love to ship with a super bisexual looking rabbit lady??? they're both pretty.

starting after work sometime this week ~

edit, now i'm curious how this will rank on my list of FF's played....

- FF Tactics Advanced - does this even... count? borrowed a dude buddy's copy in middle school and got halfway through. fondly similar to FE, cute, but the story didn't hold me.
- FF Tactics - on my to-do list to finish; I think I got two hours in on my phone port before ragequitting because i didn't get the mechanics lol. i hear the story's amazing though, so i'll go back to it.
- Vagrant Story - got 10 hours in back in college when a mini-boss absolutely destroyed me. absurdly gorgeous gameplay and the gothic visuals appeal to me so i'll either probably watch a let's play of it, or replay whenever i get the emulator re-set up.
- FF7 (original, 1997 version ported on the switch) - admittedly my favorite; finished once, probably going to play/finish again. the darker sci-fi genuine horror undertone really appealed to me, and as somebody who sephiroth always kind of cast a major shadow on in terms of my favorites since 2006 or so, hearing OWA as it appeared originally was ... really special. felt like coming home.
- FF9 - I think I played this in parallel with FF7 back around 2019 or so... very pretty game, charming, even I could tell it was meant to be a nice re-construction of the series. i got about 2/3 of the way in (destruction of the big pretty city?) but to be honest the story just didn't grip me like FF7 did.
- FF10 - played the first two hours around 2015 or so. hated. gameplay, characters, visuals - hated it all. big part of me being turned off of the series for so long lol.
- FF8 - small interest in playing this one if the FF12 playthrough goes well.
- FF14 - emet-whatever-the-dude's-named looks pretty and shadowbringers looks like my kind of story i'd go ape shit over, but no way in hell you're getting me to touch a MMORPG.
(any others not mentioned haven't been played, and no real interest either)

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helicoprion

super bisexual looking rabbit lady???

True and real. Fran rules. (Balthier also, but in the sort of way that one wants to see him get dunked on. Or at least, I do.)

There's no shortage of eye candy in this game, and I really like the way characters are stylized. Like you say, not too many polygons!

kradeelav

Balthier sounds like the original skrunkly pathetic meow meow :D

Doesn't good stylization rule in a game? Especially when there was real focus on art direction and giving each title a distinctive look. Even the character proportions alone are so different than FF9.

I would say Balthier is more... "guy who's pretty cool, but thinks he's extremely cool." So I find it satisfying to see him do cool shit and be all quippy and nonchalant about it, BUT ALSO to see his whole unflappable charming rogue brand get undermined. I find a lot of stories have Cool Guy characters and forget to give them any interesting vulnerabilities, but he gets to have both one-liners and a bad time, which is nice.

queenlua

it goes without saying i am very hyped to see you play ff12 :3 it's such a good one!!!

(and re: ff10: i would NOT have guessed you'd bounce off that one so hard haha! like, i guess now that you mention it, i can definitely see ways in which it wouldn't be your bag, but that's the FF i generally recommend people play *first* b/c i found it to be so good in both a "yay i like it" way and a "thing was just plain well-crafted" way. guess, for every FF someone will go apeshit over, someone else will hate it :P )

>:3

(i think half of the FF10 thing is like.... i got so fed up with the blitzball(?) sports focus at first? definitely a nerd-vs-jock approach with the very first bit of earlygame LOL. i forsee jock types (or jock-sympathetic) types enjoying it vastly more, meanwhile the ivalice world in general already intuitively feels like it has layers.

me, looking around at my entire Jocky McJockerson extended family while drinking a Miller Lite and wearing a muscle tank: yeah idk why i vibed so much with the blitzball thing it's very mysterious

:P

jonphaedrus

literally logs onto dreamwidth too to come holler and scream. i love that your entire list of ff games youve played started out with all ivalice alliance games too (all the tactics games and vagrant story are all set further down the timeline from 12 but the closest in narrative and structure is the original tactics).

i dont know if anyone has told you this but there are not one but two age gap men in armor who are obsessed with their liege lords relationship potentials. oh my god im so excited youre playing this game i am going to EXPLODE

>:D >:D >:D heehee, nobody's told me that yet (the age gap ship bait) but that would have seriously sold me on the game on the spot LOL - you know me too well! It's a lot of fun having that to look forward to, among some other bits. (Judge Bergan, more Ivalice lore/worldbuilding, etc).

I have *got* to catch up on your fanfiction after finishing this game since I have a sneaky feeling you've written a number of fics for it ~

unfortunately it's less than the number of fics you probably think, because most of my fics for xii are locked in long-running libre office drafts ive been picking at for most of a decade. at some point i need to sit down and just bang out the draft for the second part of my series. maybe you getting into it will be the catalyst for that to actually happen so there can be another 80k of pining helpless basch/ashe in the world.

nothing like more fans around who Get the delicious vision to reinvigorate old favorites >:D

(deleted comment)

totally fair - some games can be objectively great at one aspect of storytelling while not hitting the specific set of favorite trope buttons for each one of us. :D love that that moral greyness *is* a highlight there; so many games/movies fall sooooo flat.

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