- Joined
- Apr 27, 2024
The funny thing is I think there's a lot of room to credibly disagree with this, and I can't call any single opinion bad. I think the magic of the series changing mechanics and narratives from game to game is that no single FF obsoletes another, and I personally consider the first 12 Final Fantasies, as a whole, probably one of if not the greatest run of a game series. For all of the first 12 entries, there's at least some kind of defensible reason I can claim that every game does at least one thing better than the others (though some certainly compel my attention to replay them more than others), and there's a valid reason to at least try to play them all, as even if one isn't to your taste, those on either side of it might be. It truly is an evergreen series.
Even if we're thinning it down, I gotta vouch for IV being included.
Completely putting aside the "cultural relevance" argument, I think one of its utmost virtues is that I think it has a stronger, more focal core theme than most games in the series (the value of forgiveness and vengeance) and it does a brilliant job of hitting that theme from different angles (Cecil's struggle to forgive himself, Tellah's inability to let go of his vengeance leading to his death, Cecil's internal struggle to forgive Golbez despite it being hypocritical not to after giving himself a second chance, etc). I also think it paces remarkably, clocking in at a slim 18-20 hours (longer on a first playthrough, but still), and there's plenty of brilliant subtextual stuff, like how The Red Wings' theme, aside from being a brilliant tune in its own right, is gradually recontextualized over time from a motif describing the reach of Baron's might to the anthem of Cecil's resolution to right what's wrong (and the fact that it has that variant with the slamming trumpets as its opening cue)... I dunno, in spite of some bits of it being a bit flat, even putting aside the "for a 1991 game", I think it really holds up. I think there might not be another game I've replayed more.
Speaking just for myself, I think the issue that lies at the heart of this and many other things is that whether or not I even like the stuff that WOTL added to the original (I adore its script and its cutscenes, don't get me wrong, I am an enormous Alexander O. Smith stan), remasters that choose not to include all the content of prior releases create an unfortunate situation where there's no true best version of a given game. It makes it hard to tell someone which version of a game to play, because you have several different ones, all with their own merits. Topically, I think FFIV gets it the worst - there's so many versions of it, and the changes range from content, to game balance, to features, to localization/script differences. There really is no version of that game I can definitively point to and say "this one has it all", and I think JRPG remasters sorta struggle with this in general.
My platonic ideal for a remaster is a game that contains all the features of every version, and beyond the new stuff they added to it, offers granular settings to select which version of every feature (up to and including not having it if it wasn't in the original release) to have. That way people could essentially tailor their ideal version of a given experience, and we don't have to worry about the fear of a new release with different content completely supplanting the original (or worse, being used as a justification to make it inaccessible).
That is, the objective of any remaster of a game should be to provide something that is inarguably the most complete version of the game in question. There should be no way I can come at it and say "it lacks X from Y release".
Definitely. I think FF7's original translation is by far the worst in the series, not because it's consistently low-quality (though it absolutely has some completely abysmal bits), but because it's conspicuously lacking in just the right places at just the right times such that the plot becomes completely incomprehensible. FF7 is already the most deliberately opaque plot in the series due to its nonlinear storytelling, its unreliable narrators, and a lot of its generally strange and sorta-eldritch theming, so the language providing a further layer of obfuscation makes it very easy to just check out and fall off with the whole thing. I think merely playing through Midgar and staying awake-enough at the wheel to recognize all the times that you don't actually really comprehend how what's being said relates to the situation is a real eye-opener, and the other year I side-by-sided the script with the Japanese one on a replay only to realize that yeah, the original English release is such an incomplete experience that I struggle to call it really playing FF7.
They didn't even realize that Cloud had a catchphrase, for god's sake!
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