The Lessons Not Learned.

[Midareyukki]

All this tells me is Final Fantasy delights in deliberately failing any "what is Final Fantasy" purity test thrown at it.

xD Oh but that isn't a flaw of the series imo. That's a flaw of the playerbase. People just expected future games to be the same as before, but FF almost never was that. Closest I can remember to two games being so similar were FF3 and FF5, with 5 expanding on the Job system. There isn't a singular grand unified version of what "Final Fantasy" is in terms of plot (you have comedy stories, depressing stories, invigorative stories, emotional stories, futuristic stories...), setting (medieval, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, tribal, generic North Indian) or gameplay (ATB, CTB, RTB, ADB, Active X...). What tends to make a game part of the series tends to be certain tropes, certain characters and especially certain motifs. And it's up to each game to apply them as they see fit, even even omit them whenever unnecessary.

Heck, sometimes it's all about the label more than the game itself. That's how we ended up with FF Tactics xD it's such a clear reskin of the original Tactics Ogre, and while it reuses Cloud and some skills, most of it was pretty jarring given all the games released until then.

[vanaii]

xD Oh but that isn't a flaw of the series imo. That's a flaw of the playerbase. People just expected future games to be the same as before, but FF almost never was that. Closest I can remember to two games being so similar were FF3 and FF5, with 5 expanding on the Job system. There isn't a singular grand unified version of what "Final Fantasy" is in terms of plot (you have comedy stories, depressing stories, invigorative stories, emotional stories, futuristic stories...), setting (medieval, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, tribal, generic North Indian) or gameplay (ATB, CTB, RTB, ADB, Active X...). What tends to make a game part of the series tends to be certain tropes, certain characters and especially certain motifs. And it's up to each game to apply them as they see fit, even even omit them whenever unnecessary.

Heck, sometimes it's all about the label more than the game itself. That's how we ended up with FF Tactics xD it's such a clear reskin of the original Tactics Ogre, and while it reuses Cloud and some skills, most of it was pretty jarring given all the games released until then.

Oh, I'm not mad about that at all. That's the entire reason why I've been able to stick with the series for so long.

If I get sick of one "flavor," there are other "flavors" out there.