you talk about empirical judgement about CC and try to profile your opinion as objective that way and as a fact (hence empirical), well if one thing comes close to objective, it's that a rpg will never be considered a one of the greatest games of all time with a bad, or like you say horrible story, won't happen.. and yes maybe they have been insulted more times like you do.. cause there sure are more people like you that just don't get some things..

ItsaMii said: Kasz216 said: Riachu said: Kasz216 said: Ajax said: I disagree, and i don't think it's a matter of opinion so much as it is something that can be empircally judged... much how people can tell that Shakespeare plays have good storys, and Biodome has a bad story. For one Chrono Cross had basically no character development for like 40 of the 45 characters due to the nature of the way you were set up. Then you have the settings and locations and everything else that makes no sense when you consider that it's supposed to be set shortly after Chrono Trigger. (Since Lucca was still alive.) Including but not limited too the race of Dragonians... which you think would of been something you'd heard about/come across in Chrono Trigger... unless all the time travel stuff happened "after" the previous time travel. Which doesn't even make any sense. Which is another problem. The time traveling functions make no sense. Lavos appearing in "The Darkness Beyond Time" also doesn't make any sense... i could literally go down an entire list of things that didn't make sense consdiering it was based off Chrono Trigger... before even going in to the regular story.   Chrono Cross had one of the most retarded stories ever. Just take into account that you would only learn several points crucial to understand the plot 10 minutes before the last boss (told by 3 ghosts and one of them should not even talk). But that does not mean that it works. Another funny thing is that every character would say the same thing (with different accents and capitalization) at important points in the game. It is really funny that Poshu, the scarecrow and the troll thing who spent most of her life in an parallel dimension knew as much as Kid knew about Lucca and Lavos. That game plot is a mess and everyone who played CT should know it. Someone care to explain how the Reptites survived after you killed Azala? Where were the Dragon Gods in CT? Where was El Nido? Why every relevant item or person to save the universe is located in a small archipelago? How could the humans be Lavos creation, if we saw it land on the planet with Ayla in 65.000.000 BC? Why did Lavos plans change from "evolve into the ultimate being by sucking random planets energy" to "destroy all existence". OT Soriku you are young and impressionable. In that age we usually can not tell good an bad apart very well. I used to think that FF VII story was genial until I played it again last year. I did not even understood most of the story the first time I played. Today I can see that it is full of plot holes, pacing problems and confusing and meaninless plot twists. FF VIII has a crappy story and gameplay. Try it again when you are 18 and you will understand.

Actually, I can answer some of that.

The reptiles don't survive after you kill Azala, they're from an alternate timeline... that for some reason are dragged to the past due to the other city Chronopolis or whatever getting sent back in time. (Yeah i know, why the hell did that happen.)

To give them the benefit of the doubt i'll say it's the secret lizard ending in CT. This too is where the "Dragons" came from. Where they were during CT I can't say... It's one of those time paradox things that completly fucks with the story.

Same with El Nido which was created when the time city from the future was drawn to the past. Which again I guess happens after CT which doesn't make any sense and screws with the time paradox problem again that CT deftly avoided.

Also, I think it wasn't so much that Lavos created humans as he "directed" humans. Like influenced people to build technology and such and to advance at a faster rate then normal evolution wise. How this makes the earth stronger for him to consume rather then weaker... i've got no clue.

As for every important person being from the Arichpelo... i'd guess it's because they're all from the future but don't know it because the original scientists all had their minds brainwashed... by evil robo. So they woudln't screw with the timestream... or... something. Rather then... letting the scientists try and get back to the future.

Granted all this just raises more questions... but there you go. 

Ajax said: you talk about empirical judgement about CC and try to profile your opinion as objective that way and as a fact (hence empirical), well if one thing comes close to objective, it's that a rpg will never be considered a one of the greatest games of all time with a bad, or like you say horrible story, won't happen.. and yes maybe they have been insulted more times like you do.. cause there sure are more people like you that just don't get some things..

Dude, i get everything. It just wasn't good. It's where it was because it was... and still is the most hyped RPG to ever be released.

The build up and marketing for FF7 was bigger then any other RPG ever and has yet to be matched.  Even other FF games failed to have as big a blitz. 

 

ChichiriMuyo said: First of all, the junction system is utter crap. You can break it so hard, so fast it's not even funny. My characters all had well over 3000 hp and OHKO'd most enemies before I even fought Edea. I like uber cahracters, but not that soon.  And this is different from abusing the Gem Box and Catscratch in FF6 or Final Attack in FF7?  Final Fantasy games are all stupidly easy except maybe the NES ones (although I'd argue it was only hard if you didn't spend a lifetime and a half grinding). Worse still, the game actively encourages you not to play it. Gaining exp is bad. In fact, I'm sure many people found the game almost unbeatable because they overleveled. Stupidest leveling system ever.  I beat the game with level 99 characters my first time through who were level 99 before I even undertook the SeeD test.  The hardest fight in the game for a level 99 party isn't even the final boss, it's the Tonberry King.  You fail for clearly not knowing what you're talking about here. Also, the characters are weak. Squall goes from pretty hard to like to still being pretty hard to like, yet he has a pretty significant change of attitude. If he were real, I wouldn't want anythign to do with him before or after that. And worse still, the change isn't gradual or sensible, it just sorta happens out of the blue. If you go past him, everyone else is pretty much an archetype taken to the limits, and so either people love the characters or they hate them, and there's not much middle ground. Even my favorite characters have traits that I can look at and say "yeah, I know why people might hate them."  I agree.  Laguna's development made up for most of Squall's deficiencies though IMO. Then there's the story. It was pretty much hopeless. It started off fine enough, though hardly FF-like. Then it decends into pointless stupidity. The same orphanage? Save the girl from dying in space? Stop the missles? Blech. Nothing was original, and every aspect was done better by another game at some point in time, let alone what books can do for a story. Take for example the torture scene, which wasn't that good. In "Wizard's First Rule" the main character gets tortured, and the torture scenes there delivered. I didn't like Squall and wanted to see him really get tortured, and the most that happens is he gets shocked a few times. Richard (frome WFR) was tortured for days, or even weeks, and the way he got out of it wasn't anti-climactic like in FF8.  The story was okay up until near the end where it decided to completely stop making sense.  Also, there wasn't a singular villain to despise. In VI you had Kefka and in VII you had Sephiroth. Both were pretty badass as in their own ways, and both did plenty of things that could lead the player to hate them. In FFVIII it kept switching. Often times the bad guy was just someone being possessed and you jsut sorta felt bad for them. And then when you finally do come across the villain, there's not much oomph to it. There was no time to build a hatred, and winning didn't leave a sense of fulfillment.  Well for part of the game there was Edea and then... Yeah, that's a definite fault. So it didn't play well, the story was weak, the characters were simply archetypes personified, and it didn't deliver on any of the promise it had. What's there to like, really? There are dozens of RPGs that surpassed FF8 in any given aspect a player may care about, and there are a handful that easily surpass it in every aspect.  It did play well, the system was interesting minus the whole magic being useless part.  The story was pretty good for most of the game and Laguna's side of it was terrific.

Some of your criticism is valid, but some is just nonsense.

9 still remains my favourite, followed by 7.

ChichiriMuyo said: First of all, the junction system is utter crap. You can break it so hard, so fast it's not even funny. My characters all had well over 3000 hp and OHKO'd most enemies before I even fought Edea. I like uber cahracters, but not that soon. Worse still, the game actively encourages you not to play it. Gaining exp is bad. In fact, I'm sure many people found the game almost unbeatable because they overleveled. Stupidest leveling system ever. Also, the characters are weak. Squall goes from pretty hard to like to still being pretty hard to like, yet he has a pretty significant change of attitude. If he were real, I wouldn't want anythign to do with him before or after that. And worse still, the change isn't gradual or sensible, it just sorta happens out of the blue. If you go past him, everyone else is pretty much an archetype taken to the limits, and so either people love the characters or they hate them, and there's not much middle ground. Even my favorite characters have traits that I can look at and say "yeah, I know why people might hate them." Then there's the story. It was pretty much hopeless. It started off fine enough, though hardly FF-like. Then it decends into pointless stupidity. The same orphanage? Save the girl from dying in space? Stop the missles? Blech. Nothing was original, and every aspect was done better by another game at some point in time, let alone what books can do for a story. Take for example the torture scene, which wasn't that good. In "Wizard's First Rule" the main character gets tortured, and the torture scenes there delivered. I didn't like Squall and wanted to see him really get tortured, and the most that happens is he gets shocked a few times. Richard (frome WFR) was tortured for days, or even weeks, and the way he got out of it wasn't anti-climactic like in FF8. Also, there wasn't a singular villain to despise. In VI you had Kefka and in VII you had Sephiroth. Both were pretty badass as in their own ways, and both did plenty of things that could lead the player to hate them. In FFVIII it kept switching. Often times the bad guy was just someone being possessed and you jsut sorta felt bad for them. And then when you finally do come across the villain, there's not much oomph to it. There was no time to build a hatred, and winning didn't leave a sense of fulfillment. So it didn't play well, the story was weak, the characters were simply archetypes personified, and it didn't deliver on any of the promise it had. What's there to like, really? There are dozens of RPGs that surpassed FF8 in any given aspect a player may care about, and there are a handful that easily surpass it in every aspect.

 While I agree (though less passionately) with most of your post (see WoW's highlights), that...not so much. The torture scene was overwrought, out of place, and poorly written. Not that Terry Goodkind is anything sensational in the first place, but WFR is actually (out of the whole long dumb series) a good book. But the torture scene, of the whole book, seems out of place and unneccesary. I remember getting frustarted as to what point it served as soon as it started; that frustatration was never satisfied. 

 

WoW, like I said, I like to have uber characters but it's ridiculous to have them before disc one is more than 2/3 complete. I was really no more than 15% of the way through the game and I could have done basically everything up through disc 3 with the characters I had. Final Attack alone takes more time and effort to get than building up the uber characters I had in FF8, and you cannot accomplish that task until much, much later in the game. I'd say that is VERY different.

You're right, the final boss isn't very hard, even at 99. The problem is that you think your skills are compareable to everyone's skills. All that I said was that a number of people would have found it pretty much impossible because the system is geared to punish them for doing what RPG players do naturally. That's bad gameplay.

Laguna is the best character in FF8. I like Laguna a lot. The problem is that he's basically the only character that gets serious character development. Pretty much everyone else can't even remember that they knew eachother as children. FF7 on the other hand has background sub-plots for the majority of the characters. I wasn't a big fan of Red XIII, Barret, or Cid, but the side-stories for each of them helped me get attached. FF8 lacked that completely, and the only way Square had to cover up their sheer laziness was "oh, the GFs replace their memories!"

No, the story wasn't okay. There wasn't a single thing about the story that screamed "keep playing to find out what happens," other than Laguna's scenes. The more I played the game, the less I cared about what they were doing or why. The character interactions were tepid, so there was pretty much nothing to drive the story other than "**** has happened, do something about it."

Edea would have made a great villain. It's just that she never really was one. Like I said, most of the people who could be considered to be your nemesis in that game turn out to have just been controlled by others. It leaves you with pity for them, not hatred. I want someone like Kefka or Sephiroth who willfully coes around slaughtering innocents and doing other things that make it enjoyable to finally put them down. And those two stayed the villain of their games the whole way through, which made it that much more exciting when you did get to take them down.

No, it didn't play well. For a game to play well it has to not punish players for doing what comes naturally. If you play an RPG, you are almost guarenteed to get stronger for killing more enemies than necessary. In FF8, you get weaker. And I don't just mean the fact that enemies level up with you, but also because you lose the opportunity to gain all of the stat bonuses that the GFs won't have available until relatively late in the game. Really, would you want to play a sports game where scoring a goal gave your opponents points? Would you want to play a fighting game where hitting the opponent gives them an advantage, or an FPS where you're not supposed to kill things? Usually in an RPG if I make it to the end with characters below level 30 it means I am trying to challenge myself. In FF8 it means I was trying to make it easier.

Oh, adn thanks for bringing up magic. Not only is it not any good in battle, it hurts you to use it. And using the overpowered, drawn out GFs not only doesn't hurt you, but it's better for you. The more you spam them, the better they get. Why is the game so backwards? It punished you for gaining exp, it punishes you for using spells, it rewards you for using the most powerful attackes you have as often as possible...

And the story was tripe. Almost all of the characters fail to stand out, which is something FF7 didn't have a problem with. I know a lot of people think if the order of the two being released were reversed people's sentiments towards them would be as well, but I think the truth is neither game would have ended up as well-loved as they are now. FF7's characters gave people a reason to care, even if it was a shallow reason, and they also had interesting looks to them. FF8's characters are bland in appearance and personality. Only Laguna and Squall really shine through. The first because someone actually gave him a story, and the second because you're forced to play as him for 95% of the game.

Basically, if not for Laguna I'd have a hard time finidng any redeeming value in the game at all. The music was alright, but the Seiken Densetsu and Chrono games have always made FF's music look pale. The graphics were quite nice for an RPG of the day, but then they hardly gave you anything worth looking at. The system was backwards, too easily broken, and punished players for doing what comes natural to most RPGers. The characters mostly sucked, and didn't give me even the slightest reason to care about the story which was weak to begin with. There was no glue to hold the thing togather, and the people who really like it have probably not experienced the many, many alternatives that are startlingly better.

Really, FF8 was mediocrity incarnate. It wasn't wholly bad, but there's also no reason to play it when you could do something else.

Oh, and EVERYTHING in WFR can be described in the exact same way you described that one scene. Really, the torture scenes were the only ones that actually did seem to have any place in that whole book. It was to remind you that stupid people, like Richard, would eventually get what was coming to them, even if blind luck would get them out of it. Really, it was the sole payoff for a book that was a bit torturous to read.

The story was god awful with the most retarded plot twists ever. Everytime Ithought I had seen the worst it had to offer something new would happen to make me hate the story more.

The characters were amazingly annoying too. Not a one of them was worth a damn. Everyoe of them was an annoying cliche that I just wanted to shoot. It is ironic that the only one I had any respect for turned out to be a total pussy when he COULDN'T TAKE THE FUCKING SHOT!

The battle system was annoying too. Mostly because it was so ridiculously easy to cheese out and win. There wasn't a single hard battle in the game once you learned how to properly junction your people. Sure it was histerical at first when I junctioned 100 death to status attack, but that should never have worked. The gimped summon system annoyed me to no end as well. The fact that you should only use magic to boost your stats was histerically retarded when combined with the super annoying draw system.

The only redeeming quality it had was the mini-game it offered. If I didn't have that to push me forward I would have never finished the game, and never seen the god awful ending. I also wouldn't have had the chance to be annoyed by the Omega Weapon that essentially forced you to turn the fight into a one-sided fight because he had that stupid attack that would wipe out your entire party in one round. God did that game suck.

Words Of Wisdom said: ChichiriMuyo said: First of all, the junction system is utter crap. You can break it so hard, so fast it's not even funny. My characters all had well over 3000 hp and OHKO'd most enemies before I even fought Edea. I like uber cahracters, but not that soon.  And this is different from abusing the Gem Box and Catscratch in FF6 or Final Attack in FF7?  Final Fantasy games are all stupidly easy except maybe the NES ones (although I'd argue it was only hard if you didn't spend a lifetime and a half grinding).  Some of your criticism is valid, but some is just nonsense.

The difference is you get those items at the end of the game where as the junction system is present through-out. You can break the system way earlier in FF* than any other FF game. You could get junction - status attack and 100 death before you got off disc 1 if I recall correctly. That knocks out 90% of all random battles right there. At least in FF6 and 7 you were near the end of the game by the time they made you a god.

IMHO the magic draw system and the weapon upgrade methods really broke the gameplay.

I gotta admit though, "that" scene with Odin was easily the biggest shocked in the game. 0____0 *NO WAY!?!?!?!?!?*

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoIUKzW5mMg

 

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