TTD: Final Fantasy comparison

[wallwalker]

yohjideranged asked about which Final Fantasy canon is my favorite. It's hard to call, so let me do some comparison here.

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(Only not including the first game because, one, it's been way too long, and two, I don't feel anything particular about it, because it was my first experience and also because it felt fairly generic at the time? Although even at the time, the Black Belts felt kind of out-of-place in that world. There didn't seem to be anything else like them, IIRC. Maybe if I'd played it more recently I could say something.)


FF4 is a good fantasy universe, except for the space-travelling aliens, I suppose. It's still neat to see how the two interacted. And I really did love the character interactions in this, although I do feel like the "Oh, hey, everyone survived!" bit that they pulled for almost every death in the series was a bit of a cop-out. Not that I would've wanted Cid or Yang or the twins to actually be dead, but it really ruined the emotional punch.
(My favorite part of the game is probably still the Feymarch, or whatever it was called before. Ancient civilizations of non-human monsters are always fun.)

FF5 had some neat elements, or at least elements that I generally like - ancient technological ruins in a low-tech society has always been a favorite of mine. And I do also like the way they treated the two worlds and how they ended up being combined. That said, I'm going to say that if I'd played any of the other translations besides FFA's translation in recent memory, I might've been more impressed by the story, but I was having a hard enough time trying to figure out what I was missing in translation.

FF6 is still a favorite. Part of it was the game structure, especially in the WoR - I like that sort of open-world feel, I suppose. And I enjoyed the steampunk sort of feel it had to its technology and its culture. It had a lot of neat little secrets and things to speculate about - the Ancient Castle is still one of my favorite FF sequences, and I have a draft of a story about it that I need to finish. And it's refreshing to have a villain who isn't super-tragic, at least not in canon.
There's so much backstory to this world that I like to think about - the entire War of the Magi, or the rise of the Empire and the civilizations that it must have supplanted, just to name a few. And of course there's a lot that must've happened after the game ended, too. It's one of the neater things to speculate about.

FF7 was a big change, but that's okay; I don't have anything against the sci-fi feel of some of the FF games. It felt very dystopian, almost like cyberpunk - it had a lot in common with it, IMO, except that instead of body mods you had materia. But it certainly had the concept of megacorporations down. :p
I don't know how I feel about the nature-vs.-technology spin of parts of the plot. At least, that was how it felt to me, and usually plots like that always paint all technology with the same brush.

FF8: This one felt less like sci-fi and more like our world, until you got closer to the end and found Esthar. (Yes, I know we don't have flying Gardens.) I really feel like this world had a lot more potential than they actually followed through on (or maybe I missed something. It's certainly possible.) There were so many neat elements, and they're fun to speculate on (i.e. the magic system in general,) but I wish that the game had done more with them.

FF9: For most of the first discs, they had a great fantasy world going. It felt refreshingly, well, magical. And the plot and characters were all a lot of fun. It would've been my favorite if I were only judging from the early parts of the game. Unfortunately, it felt like the plot started failing, and then breaking down, when they got to Terra. I STILL have no idea what happened to Zidane in Pandemonium and why he suddenly had a breakdown. I mean, it was a great scene with great music, don't get me wrong. But what did Garland do to him? He said something about making him an ordinary Genome, but nothing seemed to have changed. And then you have Mr. Out-Of-Nowhere-Final-Boss (granted, I've read some fantastic meta about him - I need to find it now - that made a lot more sense, but the game didn't really go into it.)

FF10: In terms of how the world was constructed, I think this might've been one of the best canons. It makes sense, a world full of people who don't know whether or not they're going to be alive tomorrow because any day now, they might be killed by a giant sea monster, one that they've thrown a lot of bodies at but can never seem to destroy. It really felt like a post-apocalyptic world, full of survivors who were clinging to the only hope they knew. I know a lot of people were disappointed in the linear progression of the game, but I thought it made perfect sense - Yuna knew she only had one way to go, in the beginning, and the world doesn't open up until she finally accepts that the Pilgrimage isn't the way she wants to go. The symbolism works perfectly.
As for FFX-2 (or I like to call it "FFX: Politics Ruins Everything,") I haven't gotten that far yet. It's a fun enough game, and so far it's interesting to see what people are doing with their new freedom to travel without Sin being around to kill everything. There's a lot of frivolity, true, but isn't that what would happen if a bunch of people who were previously living in fear under what seemed to be a fairly strict code of behavior would do if those two things were suddenly no longer a factor?

FF13's world was really only interesting to me once we got to Gran Pulse, got to do some more exploration, and learned a bit more about what was going on, so that really cuts out most of the game. The character interactions and development were well-done, too. (I haven't played the sequels. I might someday, just because I do want to learn about Gran Pulse, but I don't know.)

So. In terms of the actual question - which canon do I like the best? - I might go with FFX, simply because it felt like the design of the world and the game fit the plot and theme perfectly. In terms of the canon I like to explore the most outside of the game... probably FFVI.

Comments

[lassarina]

I found the Pandemonium thing to be - Zidane has always known who he was, and then Garland basically pulled the rug out from under him. He took Zidane's defining quote - you don't need a reason to help people - and basically told him that that was failing at his intended design and he was meant to be like Kuja. I can see that messing with someone who might already have been teetering after realizing he is, in some ways, the same as the person who created the black mages and controlled Brahne.

[wallwalker]

That does make sense - I had forgotten just how much of a hit Zidane's sense of self had taken in the leadup to that scene, because I remembered it as being fairly strong up to that point.