[History&Lore FeedBack] Stop killing your light!

[kaynide]

How dare you devalue FFV like this?

Also probably IV more strongly in theory, but that game didn't exactly know where to put its dramatic stakes, so none of the party deaths/grievous injuries felt like they did much.

I mean, I said “arguably better plots of its peers”, as in the peers are/were (arguably) better.




Though let’s be real, early 8/16 bit FFs… as much as I loved them, were and are nerd games. Lotta people who love FF likely never even touched those games. 7 or 10 being big entry points for people in their 30s/40s now.

FF7 was a first when RPGs were “cool” for the average joe gamer, and the plot helped. Unlike 8 which was a lotta wtf,omg,bbq.

[Vyrerus]

Lotta people who love FF likely never even touched those games.

This is hilarious, because gaming really didn't hit the mainstream until about 2006/7. FF7 and the entries on PS1 were still "nerd" games by far. They just reached outside of the target demographic due to the sheer scale of their marketing (mainly 7's worldwide marketing, a first for the series).

Also, you're a nerd on an MMO forum. Nerdiness went mainstream around the same time gaming did, maybe a little later, and it's because of the reach of the internet.

Gaming itself is a nerd hobby started by nerds, originally for nerds. Society viewed gaming as for nerds and children, largely, until again... the mid 00s. And you still see a lot of people in more conservative or old folks circles express that.

What you're actually perceiving is the first big schism in the Final Fantasy series' fanbase where VII brought in a lot of people to the series(again because of the way it was marketed), and that new fanbase running rampant over and against the older one. Because it's an ongoing series that has no end in sight there's a different entry point for everyone that opts into it, it has one of these schisms since VII every 3~4 entries now.

There are people in their 20s now who started with FFXIII, for instance, and you can find them droning on about how awesome Lightning actually is, and pulling stuff from XIII-3's story trying to pedestal her as the strongest person in all of Final Fantasy lore etc.

Similarly there are people in their 30s who started with X, and have not played anything in the series before that.

This doesn't make them not nerds, it just means there wasn't something that drew them into the series before they found the entry that they started with, and in these cases, this would be their parents or older siblings introducing those games to them as children.

People in their mid 30s and older really did get to start with the beginnings of the series, and their lifelong fan status means something to a lot of them. The newer or younger fans resent that.

When they hear the older fans talk about the older games, they get defensive. No one wants to hear that they aren't a real fan of a series, even if they aren't, and so you see all of the clashes. It's hilariously all varying flavors of nerd rage. It's just Nu Nerds vs. the old guard at this point.

And that's to say nothing of the Final Fantasy fans who reject the MMOs.

"Average Joe Gamer" is out playing some other series, likely first person shooters or Candy Crush.

[DreadCrow]

This is hilarious, because gaming really didn't hit the mainstream until about 2006/7. FF7 and the entries on PS1 were still "nerd" games by far. They just reached outside of the target demographic due to the sheer scale of their marketing (mainly 7's worldwide marketing, a first for the series).

Kind of, sort of, but not really. The reason gaming became "mainstream" is it became clear that the people who grew up playing games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras weren't going to leave the hobby. But like, Final Fantasy VII still 'big' for it's time period. To relate it to music the music of the era... It wasn't Green Day levels but it was absolutely Rancid levels.

[Cleretic]

Kind of, sort of, but not really. The reason gaming became "mainstream" is it became clear that the people who grew up playing games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras weren't going to leave the hobby. But like, Final Fantasy VII still 'big' for it's time period. To relate it to music the music of the era... It wasn't Green Day levels but it was absolutely Rancid levels.

Reminder that FFX-2 got advertised on Smackdown. Like, not just 'ad playing in the break', they actually gave it a spot during the broadcast. They didn't do that for 'nerd stuff'.

Vyrerus is actually pretty damn wrong on this while being convinced he's right. Gaming was 'mainstream' since somewhere in the NES era, the thing that changed in the next few generations was the presumed core age group of the audience. NES was presumed to be a children's toy, the SNES/Megadrive era was when you started seeing teenagers being factored in (mostly thanks to arcade hits crossing over, since arcades themselves skewed to the teens at the time), the Playstation 1 and 2 explicitly aimed at that teenage demographic--although the PS2 got pretty far by just telling the family 'hey, we're a DVD player'. It wasn't until the early HD era that the presumed audience of games started including adults, and even then, it was definitely the 'college frat guy' crowd for a while there, defining stuff like early WoW and Xbox Live; after that point, it was actually Nintendo that found the way out of that by appealing to much more casual demographics. Gaming was always considered 'mainstream', it just wasn't always considered 'adult'.

And of course, since we're talking about a Japanese franchise we should consider that Japan had a whole other thing going there, gaming always had an eye for the adults there. The fitness aids and puzzle games that we associated with Nintendo's 'Wii Fit era' was there since the Famicom over there, and one of the core prongs of the audience for the Game Boy was the salaryman on a train commute. We as the international audience were completely oblivious to the mountain of Mahjong games that hit pretty much every platform over there, which hit solely because a core part of the audience was the exact kind of guy that regularly played Mahjong.

[kaynide]

I would just say, FF7 was the first time my jock-friends were talking about a video game openly at school. And it was a first time I got a “hey, you play games right, how do I get past xxx boss?”, as opposed to a “man I don’t get what you like about games bro”, or “isn’t Zelda a girls name? Dude doesn’t look like a girl”. (SNES era)

[Cleretic]

I would just say, FF7 was the first time my jock-friends were talking about a video game openly at school. And it was a first time I got a “hey, you play games right, how do I get past xxx boss?”, as opposed to a “man I don’t get what you like about games bro”, or “isn’t Zelda a girls name? Dude doesn’t look like a girl”. (SNES era)

Yeah, in my experience the schoolyard divide once we hit the PS2-Gamecube era wasn't between 'gamers versus non-gamers', but what games you played. It was a given that you did, even if it wasn't your whole thing, but were you in the Halo crowd, the sports games/Guitar Hero crowd (this kinda blended together in my experience), the WoW crowd, the Final Fantasy/Kingdom Hearts crowd, the Nintendo crowd?

I was uncool, but it wasn't because I played games at all; it was that the games I played were either thoroughly lame or completely unknown to everyone else of my age group. (And also several other reasons, that wasn't exactly my single flaw.)

[MikkoAkure]

Huh? Unless my family is an outlier, I grew up under the impression that video games were mainstream even for adults in the early 90s.

I was introduced to video games by my otherwise extremely traditional grandma and my aunt on NES/SNES and we would have Tetris Attack tournaments (Yoshi asset swap of Panel de Pon with an unfortunate name which means it’ll never get re-released in the US due to copyright). Later I used to even ask my grandma to come over to help me with certain Sonic levels. My mom had an Atari Jaguar. The only “nerd gamer” in my family was an uncle who played the early PC games like Myst and Cyberia.

Can’t say anything about FF though since I was only vaguely aware of its existence until I saw a long ad for FFX on Toonami.

[kaynide]

Huh? Unless my family is an outlier, I grew up under the impression that video games were mainstream even for adults in the early 90s.

I was introduced to video games by my otherwise extremely traditional grandma and my aunt on NES/SNES and we would have Tetris Attack tournaments (Yoshi asset swap of Panel de Pon with an unfortunate name which means it’ll never get re-released in the US due to copyright). Later I used to even ask my grandma to come over to help me with certain Sonic levels. My mom had an Atari Jaguar. The only “nerd gamer” in my family was an uncle who played the early PC games like Myst and Cyberia.

Can’t say anything about FF though since I was only vaguely aware of its existence until I saw a long ad for FFX on Toonami.

The only adult I knew in the 90s that actively played games (daily-ish anyway) was my dad, and it was strictly DOOM/Wolfenstein kinda stuff, or Warcraft/Starcraft/Command and Conquer RTS games. He would watch me play and might have input on what I was doing in say, Diablo or Chrono Trigger, but he wasn't really interested in the game itself so much as hanging out with his kid(s). And even then he was kinda embarrassed about it I think- at first he wouldn't play until all the kids went to bed.

[SnowVix]

How dare you devalue FFV like this?

Also probably IV more strongly in theory, but that game didn't exactly know where to put its dramatic stakes, so none of the party deaths/grievous injuries felt like they did much.

Did FF 5 mechanically change when that happened though? Because giving you Relm with Galuf's exact job levels and everything kind of mechanically disconnected that death.

[Cleretic]

Did FF 5 mechanically change when that happened though? Because giving you Relm with Galuf's exact job levels and everything kind of mechanically disconnected that death.

It actually does, but in fairly minor ways. Galuf and Krile's base stat spreads are different; Galuf's got the lowest Agility but highest Stamina in the game, so he'll by default wind up slower but with more HP. Meanwhile Krile's actually the fastest but has the lowest stamina. Krile's also tied for the lowest base Strength, and is very nearly tied for base Magic, both times competing with Lenna; meanwhile, Galuf's other stats are both one point off from Bartz's. (Surprisingly, Faris is the one barreling right down the middle on very stat, she's always second or third.)

You don't notice that because jobs and equipment have much more noticeable and controllable impacts, you'd probably only see the differences right at the start, but they are there. If you're really going min-max on FFV, you would be giving Galuf and Krile different jobs.