[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Somehow I missed this post...

Originally Posted by Resolute 14

For Trails in the Sky, I guess that depends on whether you want to play the fan translation of the third game. Oddly, that one never came west. I haven't played any of the Sky games, but the Trails of Cold Steel games are great - and long. If you want to start getting into the Legend of Heroes series, prepare to spend a few hundred hours on them.

Thanks... that's about what I gathered from skimming a few reviews. The length is kind of what I'm trying to get into them for. Length, writing, and old-school-ness. Basically, apparently there is an ungodly amount of writing, the combat system is fairly simple, and the story is "JRPG good", which is to say you care about the characters and what happens to them and there are some good if operatically silly twists to go with an over the top opposing force. I just started. Apparently I'm about 8 hours from when it gets good. I'm avoiding spoilers.

And back to the FF debate... Tidus being annoying is fair, but seriously, what FF games don't have annoying leads?

There's annoying, and then there's Vaan, and then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's Tidus.

Cecil in IV is solid.

Cecil is actually great. He epitomizes why IV is so good - simple, old school JRPG goodness, despite the ending going off the rails a bit (nowhere near as much as some others, and no more than X really).

Bartz? Bland as butter.

I have no strong feelings about anything related to FFV, except for Gilgamesh, who is awesome.

VI didn't really have a definitive lead.

Disagree. Terra is clearly the main, and she's great. Her story is inextricable from the main plot. Everything about that game except for I guess Gau arguably and Ultros hold up, which is why I wish they'd remade it instead of VII, but meh.

Cloud is an edgelord

I don't think you're really doing him justice. Cloud isn't my favourite lead, but the way they subverted the "cool, terse JRPG protagonist" by... well, anyone who plays it knows how that goes... created an awesome story arc that again is inextricable from the main plot of the game. You're telling me that when you first played FF7 you saw that dual-twist coming? I don't believe you.

and Squall is nothing more than some suit at Square demanding "like Cloud, but darker and edgier" - to the point that they even had to make the oversized sword even more ridiculous by adding a gun to it that never actually gets used.

The gun gets used, but yeah, Squall is pretty awful.

Zidane is a creeper.

You shut your mouth, Zidane is a great protagonist. He is who they wanted Vaan and Tidus to be. Square appears to only really be able to do the cold, brooding, cool-guy protagonist or the young, overexuberant loudmouth protagonist, and Zidane is the best of the latter branch. Again, his story is the game's story and while it doesn't have the twists and turns of Cloud's, the sort of tabula rasa, "you are what you make of yourself" parable they do with him is just... good. Partly because it doesn't overreach.

Vaan is just pathetic - and a complete waste since it isn't even his story.

No argument here. EDIT: Actually, I should add to this. I like the idea in theory - have your protagonist effectively be an observer and a chronicler of someone else's story. That's a new twist, and I have to applaud them for trying to take things in a different direction. Unfortunately, Vaan sucks. If they wanted to do that they should have just made Basch the main character.

I liked Lightning, but largely because the rest of the cast sucks

This is also pretty true of FFX, honestly, except that Lightning is... okay, I guess. She's kind of girl-Squall.

And Noctis is pretty much back in Squall territory.

Nah, you definitely get a lot more insight into Noctis emotionally than you do Squall. Not a great lead, though, regardless.

So, 50-50 good to bad, for me. But Tidus is the worst of the bunch.

And as far as what I liked about the story goes, the fact that it is straightforward and coherent is a big start. That's been a problem for much of latter FF history.

I would say incoherence is a problem with JRPGs generally (see Chrono Cross). And FFX doesn't have that problem, I guess, but it's kind of uninteresting. The story is effectively "we have to go on a quest to slay this giant evil thing and along the way some bad guys will try to stop us". The central thread is just bland as hell. And I'm actually okay with that, if you make the game about the journey - if you had, for example, a cast of characters who made it enjoyable to get to know them along the way. But you don't, you have Tidus and Yuna and Wakka and Rikku. Or if you had a villain who was compelling and cunning putting obstacles in your way. But you don't, you have Seymour. So it's a straightforward and coherent journey to blah with nothing but annoying bull#### along the way there.

Much as people love VII, the story is a nonsensical mess. Ditto VIII, XIII and XV.

It hangs together pretty well, actually. I'm not sure what it is that you think doesn't make sense. I think the problem is that you really have to be paying attention because they don't spell everything out for you. There are a couple of holes, but overall it does a pretty good job of avoiding those. The other three are just bad games all around (well, XV was... fine. I guess.)

X is a pretty good love story - something FF games have generally been poor at otherwise, and the character motivations make sense. I also like the way Jecht set up his long term plan to ultimately defeat Sin using his son. I can buy Seymour as a bad antagonist though. Especially given the fair amount of copycattery going on with respect to Sephiroth and using Sin/Jenova to wipe out life and make themselves into gods.

Except that at least Sephiroth had a good fall-from-grace insanity-inducing story arc that you get to be a part of. Seymour is just all terrible all the way.

As for the love story, it can't really be a good love story when the male lead is effectively the "Hayden Christensen Anakin" of video games and the female lead's sole personality trait is being shy and introverted. If the last scene had capped off an actually compelling love story the game could have been saved by that alone, but it didn't. If you don't like spending time with the characters, how can you give a crap if they end up together? I cared infinitely more about Zidane and Garnet. Hell, Locke and Rachel probably had more of an impact on me. The Tidus / Yuna romance, in my opinion, is barely above Squall / Rinoa.

I actually didn't mind the Jecht thing so much - like everything else in the game, his "mean dad" schtick was way over the top and cheesy as #### but at least in theory it could have been an interesting bit of motivation for the protagonist - but Tidus's character was so unsalvageable that it just didn't matter.

If I were to rank the games, VI, X, XII, VII, IV (the preceding three can almost go in any order), IX, XV, XIII, VIII, I, V, III, II.

I'd have it VI, VII, IX, IV, XII, X and the order of the rest don't particularly matter as I wouldn't recommend playing them to anyone. Tactics would be in the middle somewhere, if we're counting that one. I guess VIII kind of matters but I don't really want to put it on the list with the others because it was bad enough that it probably ranks below the games that I don't even care about, like XV and V.

Anyway, these games are fun to argue about... I disagree with you on X, but I understand your viewpoint. I also think you're overrating XII, which to me was just an unfinished product. A half-finished really good game is still better than a fully finished mediocre one, of course, and there are a lot of good hours in XII, but its potential was unrealized. Actually, I'm sort of hoping the Trails series is going to do what that one was trying to do better (I understand that global politics is a significant facet of these games).