| Kasz216 said: Nothing you've said here has actually disproven my point, and only shows your general defensiveness about it. You can be defensive, but more experience is more expierence. There really isn't anything else to say about it.
The one who plays the games in order is the one who will be more expierenced and be able to give a better opinion. This is generally undeniable. As such, you would need to prove that the people who started at 7 and beyond were somehow superior inherently to deny the advantage of having played the Final Fantasy games at time of release. This of course is a claim that makes no sense. As such, expierence generally wins out. As for "nostalgia glasses"... these are videogames. All one needs to do to see if they have nostalgia glasses or not is replay the game and see how it holds up. Most games that were actually great when you played them will still hold up today, unless what made them great was some sort of industry defining thing that was later copied and improved upon or replaced later.
It really does say something that very few people who have played 6 before 7 think 7 is better... and that very few people who played 7 before 10 think 10 is better. Also, that nobody thinks FF1 is the best FF ever. FF1 actually being my First Final Fantasy. Second Console RPG behind Dragon Warrior. |
If I'm defensive, it's because I'm getting told that my opinion is worth less than yours. Some people find that kind of thing annoying :3
And nothing I said was meant to disprove your point explicitly; it was meant to show you what is wrong with the approach you are using. We agree that people who played 6 before 7 tend to prefer 6 and vice versa, but we put forward different reasons as to why (mine wasn't entirely serious...); in one scenario, it is the FF7 fans whose opinion is worth less, in another, it is that of the FF6 fans. They're both equally valid arguments, but people reject the one that contradicts their hypothesis; the one that supports their hypothesis will be very convincing. Your hypothesis is that people who prefer my favourite game to your favourite have impaired judgement, so it's only natural that you won't see what's wrong with the argument that supports your idea but you will see what's wrong with the argument that contradicts it.
The point is...
It's easy to find a group of people who will, by and large, agree with you, and it's easy to think of reasons why that group's opinions should be privileged. It's so easy that someone who thinks the opposite can do it just as well. Most likely, both parties will be partly right, insofar as they are right that the bias they are pointing out actually exists. It's just that there are different biases that go the other way as well, and that cancel it out to some extent. If you really wanted to (you'd need to have far to much time on your hands, mind you), I'm sure you could identify a group of people for each of the FF games that is more likely to favour it and think of a reason why that group's opinion should be taken more seriously than others. Maybe then you'd see what's wrong with this line of argumentation; all it does is show one's own bias in believing that x, the thing that makes group y's opinion more valid than group z's in one respect is more important than w, the thing that makes group x's opinion more valid than group z's.
Also, I think you vastly over-estimate the importance of playing games in the "right" order. It's just as likely that people simply prefer the one they played first, especially when it comes to games that create such a strong emotional connection with their fans and inspire such loyalty. It's just as likely that people who played 6 first made that emotional connection and found it hard to open themselves up to another story and set of characters. Any discrepancy between the proportion of people who played 6 first and ended up liking 7 more and the proportion who played 7 and ended up liking 6 can easily be explained by pointing out that the older games had a smaller and more "devoted" fanbase and that the mass popularity and acclaim of 7 (as well as the fact that Square jumped ship from Nintendo to Sony) created a great deal of resentment towards 7 before it had even come out (maybe you don't feel it, but an awful lot of people do). 7 would have to be massively superior, to the extent that comparing the two games would be a joke, for it to overcome this and convert even half of the fans who started off by loving 6.
I'm sorry to resurrect this thread with another tl;dr (that will probably get ignored anyway), but I haven't posted here for a couple of days and I have great trouble letting things like this go :3
