Wednesday, November 23, 2016

T5W#67-Top 5 Personal Final Fantasy Moments


It almost pains me to say this, but as far as Final Fantasy fans go, I cant rank myself in the top tier.  I’ve hardly played any of the games, many of which are time honored classics like IV, VI and VII.  Even more painful, I have to admit, is that I have never even beaten a game ive attempted (Kingdom Hearts spin off series aside).  As a gamer, that makes me very sad.  Because despite my greenness, I really do like the Final Fantasy franchise.  Their worlds are so imaginative and beyond huge and they have stories and a cast to match that majesty and ambitious undertaking.  I always look forward to hearing tales of the next game (the main entries are always pretty lengthy in wait times).  And this year, I’m hoping one of my chief Christmas gifts is the long awaited Final Fantasy XV, which is due out next week.  With this in mind, I’ve decided to dedicate this weeks Top 5 to the small moments in my life where Final Fantasy was at the forefront.  One or two may be directly related to game play.  For the most part, these are the stories, scenes and overall feels that made me continue to admire one of the greatest RPG Video Game series of all time.

 

#5-Cloud and Squall, back to back for the first time

Final Fantasy VII was the first time I had ever heard of the Final Fantasy franchise (more on that in a couple of entries).  VII coming out a couple years later definitely caught my interest.  While the games lead protagonist is a bit…not that great, it would be years before I tried Final Fantasy VIII and learned that myself.  Until then, Squall looked like such a bad ass with that costume and his Gunblade (still a weapon I want to actually exist).  Skip ahead to Kingdom Hearts, which successfully did the impossible and married Disney and Final Fantasy together.  This meant that heroes from across the FF pantheon could appear together on screen…and that meant a very cool moment where Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart, my first two heroes of the series, were back to back, swords drawn and ready to kick some ass.  I love the adventures of Sora, Donald and Goofy.  But for one moment, I wish I could have been playing this team ups battle.

 

#4-Final Fantasy VIII’s Intro
While I never finished it up, Final Fantasy VIII was my first official attempt at tackling a Final Fantasy title (and before anyone asks, a friend was nice enough to loan it to me and he didn’t have VII.  Sometimes you just have to settle).  My reaction to what I played was pretty mixed.  But my reaction to that intro scene is still one word, “whoa”.  Not only were the CG incredible for a PS1 title, but it was one of the most perfectly crafted scenes in any video game.  You’ve got the choir, the orchestra, the vivid vision of battles, beautiful women and witches going through glass windows.  In a way, it almost set the game up to be a bit of a let down cause of the turn based system in the game.  I wanted to play that opening battle between Squall and Seifer they way they were on screen, not take turns trading blows.  The rest of the game may have been a mixed bag.  But when that final piano note plays and the “Final Fantasy VIII” logo appeared, you knew this was it, you were in a real Final Fantasy game and it was time to play.

 

#3-The Spirits Within is a LETDOWN
2001 should have been a big year for Movies based on Video Games.  In an issue of Gamepro, I learned about the release of a Tomb Raider AND a Final Fantasy movie.  Tomb Raider was meh.  Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within though…wasn’t as good as I really hoped it would be.  In fact, I think I was in denial about how bad it was for years.  I mean, the animation was good and it had the Final Fantasy name so I had to cut it some slack, right?  Oh how naieve I was back then.

You can find my review for the movie here (http://gundamanimeblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/final-fantasy-spirits-within.html)  But this is my sum up, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was built up as an epic game changer and it really could have been.  If it had tried to be more like the games than inspired it than a generic American scifi film, it could’ve been the start of something really big and revolutionary for video game adaptations.  But sadly it will just go down in history as a very pretty but less than stellar film.”

 

#2-The First Final Fantasy VII Commercial aka THE BEGINNING
I don’t know what I was doing when this little promo just popped up.  But this was the beginning, my introduction to the universe of Final Fantasy.  In one, 30 second commercial, a dramatic narrarator talked about evil empires, the lifestream, showed us glimpses of Cloud, Jenova and Sephiroth.  I had no idea what to make of it, but at that moment I hated not having a Playstation.  Thinking about it back then, I wonder if I could have understood how an RPG worked.  I also wonder if the narrarator also knew that, since “press the reset button” should only be done if you’ve saved all of your progress.  This wasn’t a simple action game, this was much deeper than that.  And I wanted to learn all about it.
 

#1-Versus becomes XV
E3 2012.  Square announced that it would be making a big announcement about their long in development title, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, a PS3 exclusive spin off of Final Fantasy XIII.  The trailer played and the CG cutscenes looked as good as ever.  I wanted to play this game, always had.  But much like Kingdom Heart 3, I wondered if it was ever going to see the light of day.  The action ended, and the title came on, “Final Fantasy Versus XIII.”  Ok…but wait, there was one more surprise.  BOOM, the title exploded and reformed…into “FINAL FANTASY XV”.  My first reaction was, “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST CALL IT THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!!!!”  After I calmed down, I got hyped again, especially when I heard this gorgeous looking game would be available on Xbox systems (I had upped from Playstation to Xbox back in college to play Halo).  A solid release date hadn’t been set yet.  But that didn’t matter.  With “XV” slapped to the title now, production was going to go into overdrive to get done.  I can only hope it was worth 10 years of waiting.
 

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