I've been playing games for over four decades at this point.
This is, without exaggeration, the most poorly-designed, poorly-functioning RPG I have ever experienced. It is misery to play.
Even if you haven't played it yourself, I've sure you've heard all the stories about the ill-conceived stat system where you can hit your own party members to increase your HP etc. I would like to emphasize that the lamented stat system represents merely the outer layer of bad decisions. There are, like, nine layers of bad decisions below that. There are numerous points in the game that seemed to indicate the designers had no idea how video games in general work, much less their own. There is a roadblock in the game (the Dist/Deist Cave) where it is honestly astonishing, worthy of intensive study, how every single bad decision in the game comes together to create a complete clusterfuck. It is astonishing. It is a masterpiece of incompetence that seems impossible to achieve without intention.
I will also emphasize that every single aspect of the game, from the battles to the world design to the constant poisoning to the utterly astronomical amount of grinding most spells (some of them mandatory for progress) take to become useful to the goddamn insistence on uselessly putting resurrected players in a position where they can't attack for utterly no player benefit, is designed for a maximal waste of the player's time. It is not content to be merely bad, like a Phantasy Star III. It wants to hurt the player.
Before I begin the discussion in earnest, I'd like to get this out of the way: I did not use exploits. I attempted instead to approach the game on its own terms. Using the game's many exploits seems to be a ubiquitous method for dealing with the game's many issues: even the author of this playthrough, who was going for a more organic, fresh-faced "first-time player" approach to the series, knew about and used the Toad and no-armor exploits, used save states in the final dungeon, etc. I don't want to hear, "Well, why didn't you use exploits?" I was trying to show the game respect, engage with its systems honestly, and play it straight. Claiming my complaints are invalid because I didn't use exploits is a self-defeating argument. If you have to break the game to make it work, the game is already broken.
I just got a comment on the overview I made of elements Lunar borrowed from Ys that reflects an odd bit of discourse I've noted elsewhere around the article, so I'm going to address it in its own post.
I'm going to restrict this conversation to this one reply because I had a parent die following an amputation literally a few days ago and have limited capacity right now for conversations where folks explain to me things I already know, like the identity of Studio Alex.
I'm well aware of comments elsewhere fixating on the use in the post of the word "steal"—which actually isn't used that often; twice in the article, as much as the above commenter's suggested replacement of "influence," which they seemed to think wholly absent, is used. This oversight kind of reveals that the problem here is an emotional overreaction—a gut-level, offended recoiling from any perceived slight to Lunar, followed by a conviction that hair-splitting about terminology will wipe away what's, well, staring us in the face.
Dude, look at the original article. Look at it. In many cases, it's not a vague "influence"; it's willful 1-for-1 copying, particularly with the shot compositions. I'm not saying that I hate Lunar or that Lunar is without merit or originality by noting this. I'm saying that Lunar's creators took a number of its ideas from elsewhere—namely, this one series whose early incarnations were in the West trapped on less-popular consoles and imperfect ports and are therefore largely unfamiliar to Western gamers. I'm quite comfortable with my word choices in the post and feel I was more than fair in assessing the extent of what Lunar took from Ys.
(Re: the poster's specific objections: I don't see how Tomi's Falcom connection negates the argument—if anything, it makes it stronger—or how claiming "hey, other games copy!" proves it didn't happen in this case.)
If the post bothers you, consider it from this angle: Great artists, as it is said, steal because they make others' ideas their own—they bring the ideas to life in ways the originators didn't. As I state right at the top of the article, I think Lunar did far better with the ideas—I don't have pages and pages of posts dedicated to Ys on my blog or social media, after all. (The people freaking about the article conveniently overlook, say, the part where I compare Dark Fact and Ghaleon to a 2600 and ray tracing.)
But, folks, they stole. Let's not be willfully blind here.
(Note: I've had this post largely written for a while, but due to recent travails, I haven't been able to finish it until now. Rest assured I have not been pulling your leg and putting off various commitments to write umpteen pages on Final Fantasy. Those same travails, however, mean that I'm not able to futz with the original-rez pngs right now to make them a more-legible size. I apologize and ask you use the magnify functions on your browsers.)
A few years ago, in post titled "Do I...like Final Fantasy?", I wrote in regard to the first installment:
I regard it, somewhat abstractly at this point, as a good game. I don't think I'd ever play it again.
Well, I put the lie to those words: I played it again recently. (...Relatively recently. See below.) The main impetus was, as with The Goonies II, Jeff Gerstmann's NES ranking project, where he relegated the game to what most consider a low berth (the mid-hundreds) because he likes Dragon Warrior and doesn't like Final Fantasy and doesn't like that many people like Final Fantasy and not Dragon Warrior and Gerstmann, despite being a games journalist with an extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, is a very "my way or the highway" type of person (particularly nowadays, unfortunately, but that is another post).
(AN ASIDE: I think the ubiquity of and common experience with Dragon Warrior - where it was included for free with Nintendo Power subscriptions - actually torpedoed the franchise for a good, long while in the States. It's not by any means a bad game, and I remember getting enjoyment out of it, but it was published over here three years after its Japanese release date, and it is the most aggressively basic RPG, painfully linear and uncreative, both strategically and tactically. It is a game of extraordinarily limited options, where there is one single right thing to do, one single path in every scenario, and while that is fine, and even desirable, for the My First RPG it is, it can be...well, downright painful. I know, logically, that there has to be way more to the series now, but there's a part of me to this day, 35+ years later, that recoils inwardly a bit at the prospect of the idea of playing a DQ game, at what my mind will tell me will be an endless, mindless procession of rote actions: "A Slime draws near! Command?" "Thy Hit Points reduce by 3." "The Slime is running away.")
Well, I came away with my positive impression of Final Fantasy intact. Reinforced, even: replaying it today gave me an appreciation of how the game is, like, well-designed and intuitive. The entire inland sea is effectively a tutorial area. The early dungeons are actually organized smartly to teach the player how to conduct an effective search of dungeons and how important areas and items are earmarked.
I'd even defend the much-maligned mechanic where your warrior steps forward and flails at air if they were commanded at the start of the round to attack an enemy that's felled before they get a chance to act. For one, I honestly don't think it's unrealistic, so far as a video game fight goes: your little people get their marching orders before the battle is joined, and it makes sense, in the fog of war, that some soldiers are going to be left with nothing to do if you overcommit resources to a given foe. For another: I think the mechanic is actually useful. It kept me engaged. I wasn't automatically pressing "Fight." I had to think of how much damage my various party members would likely deal, and to which enemies I should dispatch them to minimize the damage I'd take and the resources I'd expend.
The game also offers a lot of variety and player choice. The composition of your party; the order in which you tackle the game world; the spells with which you equip your casters: Dragon Warrior - and I don't mean to make this a DQ vs. FF post; this particular comparison just did come to mind after the Gerstmann video - would not consider this level of player agency in its rigidity.
I also have to say: it feels good to play and finish a classic long-form game. Don't get me wrong: Dead by Daylight is an endlessly creative game, and I've had lots of fun with it, and I've enjoyed many indie gems on Steam and GoG of varying scope and ambitions. But there's something about playing through a long, foundational game like Final Fantasy that's like a meal, you know? Nutritious; like I'm returning to the roots of it all, like I'm getting back to the heart of things.
I decided in my playthrough to go only by info in my memory - no looking up spells to see what they did (even though that info was available from the start for NES gamers via the manual). I tried not to grind, but I did at a couple points stop to get up enough cash for some useful equipment. (This worked just fine; grinding actually isn't necessary.)
Also: as detailed at depressing length, I ran into a roadblock 'round about the Gurgu Volcano due to my party composition. Detailing this imbroglio took much of the wind out of my sails for detailed journaling of this playthrough - and the later stages are a bit less detailed as a result. Onward!
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