07-26-2010, 03:03 PM
ITT: people who don't know Final Fantasy games.
FF1-3 was exploring and defining the genre. They were experiments, if anything. FF4 was the first game to have a story on an epic scope. The characters were given traits, and the story had a strong narrative. FF2 has characters in the narrowest sense, and FF3 had the start of storytelling, but FF4 used them both to make a fantastic game.
When you talk about the job system, I'm not sure you're clear on what it is. Jobs were used in FF3, then FF5. Your character had their stats altered based on the class they became. Those were the only two games to use that system before FFX-2, so your claim that FF7 did away with the job system is incorrect. It hadn't been used since FF6 and was brought back later. What FF7 did was get rid of any uniqueness to the characters. FF6 had special skills, and FF7 allowed you to have shells that could all do the same thing. FF8 was worse in this respect. FF9 brought back specialized characters, and FF10 did away with it again.
As for the "tired of medieval setting" claim, that was mostly done away with in FF4. FF5 was almost a parody of it and FF6 was one of the first examples of steampunk.
FF7 did NOT have a better plot. The parts that aren't rewritten from FF6 are incomprehensible. Te golden age of Final Fantasy was the SNES era, 4-6, with 6 being the best in the series (imo). From there, things started to fall apart. 7-10 were varying degrees of good to great and the series has started to degrade in recent years, becoming more generic, convoluted, and pedantic.
tl;dr version- everything you like about FF7 was done better in FF4-6.
FF1-3 was exploring and defining the genre. They were experiments, if anything. FF4 was the first game to have a story on an epic scope. The characters were given traits, and the story had a strong narrative. FF2 has characters in the narrowest sense, and FF3 had the start of storytelling, but FF4 used them both to make a fantastic game.
When you talk about the job system, I'm not sure you're clear on what it is. Jobs were used in FF3, then FF5. Your character had their stats altered based on the class they became. Those were the only two games to use that system before FFX-2, so your claim that FF7 did away with the job system is incorrect. It hadn't been used since FF6 and was brought back later. What FF7 did was get rid of any uniqueness to the characters. FF6 had special skills, and FF7 allowed you to have shells that could all do the same thing. FF8 was worse in this respect. FF9 brought back specialized characters, and FF10 did away with it again.
As for the "tired of medieval setting" claim, that was mostly done away with in FF4. FF5 was almost a parody of it and FF6 was one of the first examples of steampunk.
FF7 did NOT have a better plot. The parts that aren't rewritten from FF6 are incomprehensible. Te golden age of Final Fantasy was the SNES era, 4-6, with 6 being the best in the series (imo). From there, things started to fall apart. 7-10 were varying degrees of good to great and the series has started to degrade in recent years, becoming more generic, convoluted, and pedantic.
tl;dr version- everything you like about FF7 was done better in FF4-6.