Hey folks, Daniel here with some timely (and some not-so-timely) musings on a few things Final Fantasy.

The Final Fantasy franchise has once again become a dominant force in my entertainment consumption this year, arguably for the first time since I put a bow on Enduring Final Fantasy VII all the way back in 2013 (and as a side-note, how the heck was that almost eight years ago?). Since the beginning of 2021 I've played through both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy XIII, not to mention a sizeable chunk of Final Fantasy X on the PS Vita before putting it down in favour of other stuff. A few months back I discovered the dansg08 YouTube channel and have taken to watching episodes of their commentary playthrough series of various Final Fantasy titles before bed most evenings. Last week the channel began a Final Fantasy V blind playthrough, which has got me tempted to revisit that game myself and try out some different Job combinations - a temptation I have thus far managed to resist, if only because I'm still dedicated to the post-game content of FFXIII. And, of course, there have been a number of FF-related announcements recently, including the Pixel Remaster series and the... "chaotic" Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. Given this running theme, I thought it might be an idea to get some of my recent FF-centric thoughts down in blog form.

Final Fantasy VII

My personal history with Final Fantasy VII spans over twenty years at this point, and has been regurgitated so many times on this blog that I feel it no longer bears repeating to those kind enough to still be reading my ramblings. Suffice it to say, it holds a very special place in my heart as the first story-driven video game I played to completion, and the first video game I fell in love with. Depending on the day you asked me, I'd more often than not tell you that it's my favourite game of all time. In 2010 I embarked on a playthrough and accompanying blog series in an effort to determine whether the game still had anything to offer a contemporary audience. That series ended up spanning thirty-five entries across nearly four years, and the process of writing those blogs taught me a lot about why I love Final Fantasy VII and video games in general. To this day, it's one of my proudest achievements as a writer, even if I do feel that aspects of it haven't aged very well - a sentiment that, fittingly enough, mirrors my feelings about the game that inspired it.

While Final Fantasy VII is never far from my mind when it comes to discussing video games, recent events such as last year's release of Final Fantasy VII Remake have brought it back to the forefront of my thoughts. Earlier this year, almost eleven years to the day since the start of that blog series, I began a new playthrough of Final Fantasy VII - my seventh overall, and my most comprehensive exploration of the game to date. I went deeper down the FFVII rabbit hole than I've ever been before in a single playthrough - I bred gold Chocobos, mastered every available kind of Materia, acquired every Ultimate Weapon and final Limit Break, and even put paid to those pesky superbosses Ruby and Emerald WEAPON for the very first time.

I chose the PlayStation 4 version of Final Fantasy VII for this latest playthrough - partly for convenience, partly for the HD presentation, and partly for the Trophy support (the Platinum Trophy serving as a target to aim for in my completionist approach). But while it ticks all of those boxes, I remain reluctant to name it the definitive way to play FFVII in 2021 - partly because I haven't played every available version of FFVII, but primarily due to persistent technical issues. Throughout my playthrough I experienced noticeable instances of freezing, usually (but not exclusively) in battle as a precursor to magic and summon animations, sometimes for almost imperceptible periods of time and others for up to two seconds. While this was never game-breaking given the battle system's turn-based nature, it did have a frustrating impact on the game's immersion factor, to the point where I would probably opt to return to the PS1 Classic version on either PS3 or PS Vita for a prospective next playthrough.

While this most recent return to Midgar and the adventures of Cloud and co. served to once again remind me what I love about Final Fantasy VII, that wasn't its sole purpose. As I alluded to above, I've come to believe that my Enduring Final Fantasy VII blog series, while an incredible personal creative achievement, doesn't represent what I'm truly capable of as a writer. More than a decade has passed since I began that project, and in the time between then and now I've grown a lot both as a person and as a creator. That's why I'm planning to revisit the concept and produce an entirely new close reading of my all-time favourite video game, this time presented as a video retrospective. I'm currently going back through recorded footage of my playthrough as I work on a script, so the finished product is still a ways off, but I hope to have more to share in the very near future.

Final Fantasy XIII

The second Final Fantasy game to capture my attention recently has been Final Fantasy XIII. My return to the twin worlds of Cocoon and Pulse was directly inspired by watching the playthrough on the aforementioned dansg08 YouTube channel, which served to remind me that for all its shortcomings, the series' thirteenth instalment had a pretty darn cool battle system that I ultimately never saw the full potential of due to not digging into the wealth of post-game content beyond its closing credits. Having seen those credits roll only yesterday after a little over forty hours of play, I'm just now beginning to get stuck into Cie'th Stone missions, weapon upgrades and late-game Crystarium expansions.

This also marks the first time I've played Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3, as both of my previous playthroughs were conducted on the Xbox 360 version of the game. It has been a joy witnessing the game in motion in glorious HD after all this time, and on a decent-sized screen to boot - my first playthrough was on the 14" SD TV in my university accommodation, while my second was on a 17" HD-ready TV limited to the 360 version's inferior 576p resolution. It sounds like an exaggeration, but there have genuinely been times where, were it not for the DualShock 3 nestled in my hands, I could have been fooled into thinking I was playing a PS4 game. This fact is made even more mind-blowing considering that FFXIII isn't some end-of-generation swansong, but a title that released smack bang in the middle of the PS3's lifespan. This game originally released in Japan almost twelve years ago, and it still looks incredible. That's a heck of an achievement, right there.

More than a decade removed from its original release, it's easier for me to understand why Final Fantasy XIII turned out the way it did. I've read developer interviews that point to FFVII as a major source of inspiration, and having played the two games almost back-to-back, it's even easier to see where that inspiration has bled through into the finished product. From its spectacular opening (which depicts a former soldier and her gun-toting, wise-cracking associate leaping off a train and assaulting a giant scorpion-shaped war mech), through to its conclusion (wherein the party return to the place where it all began and face off against a crack military force before descending into the final dungeon), both games hit a lot of very similar narrative beats. Much more apparent, though, is FFXIII's structural similarity to the campaigns of first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo. This is another comparison I remember being brought up in developer interviews around the time of release, and as time goes on, it only makes more sense to me. Much of Final Fantasy XIII is a corridor punctuated with carefully choreographed combat encounters, each featuring multiple enemy types in various configurations and requiring different strategies to overcome. If that isn't design straight out of the Halo playbook, then I don't know what is.

I still have a hefty chunk of Final Fantasy XIII's post-game to explore, so I don't anticipate being done with it any time soon. It's been a fun revisit, one that I wasn't expecting to enjoy as much as I have, and I think a lot of that has been down to accepting the game for what it is rather than feeling disappointed about what it's not. When I'm finally done exploring the wilds of Gran Pulse later this month, I'm considering hopping over to its direct sequels in a bid to play through the whole trilogy before the year is out. I've not played XIII-2 since its original release back in 2012, and I've never touched Lightning Returns at all, so my curiosity to see the rest of the trilogy play out is definitely piqued. If I do end up playing them, you can be sure I'll be sharing my thoughts on them here.

Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters

While I didn't come away from the week of E3 feeling excited about too many announcements, the one that may have caught my interest the most was nestled away in Square-Enix's presentation in the form of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series. Billed as an antidote to the unpopular sprite-work of the mobile ports of FFs V and VI, the Pixel Remaster series seemingly aims to deliver more faithful recreations of the first six games in the Final Fantasy franchise. Promising redesigned sprite art from original pixel artist Kazuko Shibuya and new arrangements of the original soundtracks from none other than Nobuo Uematsu, the Pixel Remaster series is being billed as the definitive way for people to experience the franchise's origins in 2021. The first three games from the NES are set to release at the end of this month, with the SNES-era titles following at some point before the end of the year.

On the one hand, the concept of the Pixel Remaster series is something that I approve of wholeheartedly. The series' canon pre-VII has become a bit of an unwieldy mess at this point, with multiple versions of games being remade and remastered across multiple systems and very little consideration for parity between them. A recent conversation with a friend of mine on the subject of the Pixel Remasters ended up descending into a confusing exploration of the series' timeline as I navigated the WonderSwan Color remakes of FFs I and II and all the subsequent versions they inspired, the "Advance" series of ports of the three SNES games to the GBA, and the DS remakes of III and IV (to date the only games from the pre-VII era to get an upgrade to the third dimension). The result of this is that the "definitive" versions of these games currently span multiple systems and multiple console generations. In some cases there's no clear consensus on what the "definitive" version even is, due to drastic differences in both presentation and gameplay between different versions. A concerted effort to consolidate the franchise's early canon into six definitive and thematically consistent experiences all playable on the same hardware is a concept that I can definitely get behind.

On the other hand, there's a part of me that struggles to trust modern Square-Enix to give this undertaking the time and attention I believe it deserves. That part of me feels vindicated by subsequent trailers featuring gameplay footage, all of which has been meticulously scrutinised by fans, and the results of that scrutiny haven't been encouraging. There's talk of inconsistent pixel width across multiple assets, text boxes not being correctly aligned, uncertainty about the revised character sprites, and a general dislike of the font being used, all pointing to these being rush jobs with little thought or care put into the presentation. It also looks as though the Pixel Remasters won't include any bonus content from subsequent ports and remakes, such as the bonus dungeons in the PSP version of Final Fantasy, or the additional Jobs in the GBA release of Final Fantasy V (personally this isn't something I object to if the games are aiming to be faithful remakes of their respective original releases, but I can understand disappointment in the wider community over what essentially amounts to cut content). All this seems to point to the Pixel Remaster series being a quick cash-grab rather than the reverent reimaginings I'd been hoping for.

Ultimately though, the most disappointing part of this announcement was the revelation in its coda that these Pixel Remasters will be exclusive to Steam and mobile platforms, with no mention of any plans for console releases. As someone who spends the vast majority of their game time on the sofa in front of the TV with a controller in hand, this oversight really stings. I'm the sort of mug who would happily drop $60+ on a bundle of all six of these games if they were made available on the PlayStation Store or the Switch's eShop, and judging by fan reactions online, I'm far from the only one feeling this way. Some have said that these games are built on existing code for mobile and PC and it's not worth the effort to Square-Enix to port them to consoles, but I'm not sure I believe that. After all, wasn't part of the appeal of the PS4 and Xbox One the fact that their architecture was similar to that of PCs? I thought that was the reason for the greater parity across multi-platform releases than the mess that was the PS3/360 era? Not to mention that the old versions of III and IV on Steam and the Google Play Store are ports of the aforementioned 3D remakes on DS, meaning the Pixel Remaster versions of those games have presumably been rebuilt from the ground up? I've also heard speculation that Square-Enix are likely targeting mobile with these releases to coax prospective players into their free-to-play games on Android and iOS, and my inner cynic is certainly more willing to buy that explanation. I'm just hoping that the significant public outcry will be enough to persuade Square-Enix to consider a U-turn and push out console versions of the Pixel Remaster series in 2022. Otherwise, outside of possibly checking out FFIII on mobile just to see how it compares to the DS remake, I'm not sure I'll be parting with the contents of my wallet for them.

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I think that's all I've got to say on Final Fantasy-related matters at this moment in time. Despite referencing it in the opening paragraph, I don't actually have any thoughts on Stranger in Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin - the trailer didn't elicit any strong feelings from me one way or another, while a lack of PS5 has prohibited me from playing the demo. It's likely the game isn't for me, and that's something I've already made my peace with. The only other game I really have any thoughts worth sharing on at the moment is Oddworld: Soulstorm, the latest game from the Legendary Limitless Luscious Lorne Lanning and his team at Oddworld Inhabitants, and that doesn't really fit the overall theme of this blog entry. Maybe I'll put something together about that some time in the near future. Anyways, I hope everyone who reads this is doing okay. Take care, stay safe, and I'll see you around.

Daniel