Most Underrated FF That You Feel Shouldn't Be

[EmperorLeo]

Odd that you say that while having a character that belongs to a game that has essentially an open-world bit during the 16-bit era.

FFVI is my favorite FF game, but for this thread I took a stance on a game that I actually enjoyed and felt was an underrated game but FFII is definitely number one on the list now that I've given it thought. I still stand by my comment though.

If you may remember correctly, while FFVI had some degree of linearity (as all JRPGs do), it breaks that linearity twice. For starters, the idea that you can choose one of three stories that happen at the same time and run them as you wish. Then, after you get the Airship in the WoR, you can choose to go only with the characters you have, or get the rest and enter with a much, much more solid party.

I do recall. I just got done with the section of the game where the team splits not a few days ago. After you get the Airship in WoR, the only game that's more open is FFXII. Every other game, you've either explored all the places by the time you get transportation, or you can't access it until you get a better version later in the game (see FFVIII and FFIX), after you've visited just about everywhere anyways. Even FFXII forces you to do nearly everything on foot, but the use of teleport crystals nullifies that a little.

The problem with FFXIII is that it feels like you're watching a movie, or moving on a rail with no wiggle room to work with (until later in the game). To put it in perspective: it's to console RPGs what a railroading GM is for tabletop RPGs. At least other games have side-quests that give the illusion that you're doing something else.

Railroading is a pitfall that every GM every now and then falls into, and when that happens, if the NPCs/explaination is valid, it's justified to an extent. I don't like it when it happens, but I've already established that FFXIII failed to even try to not be linear without giving true side quest. They gave you hunts, like FFXII had, which wasn't really a side quest at all because it, "I had to kill this thing. I wish I could have done it. Do it for me please. I'll give you this item." without any variety. I wanted to point out that the game, outside of how linear it was, it had a strong point by incorporating true elements of strategy in battle by limiting your choices the characters could grow. Even after you unlock all the roles for every character, you still have clearly defined experts to certain roles (Hope was a rav/med but even when you max out his sent, he'll never be remotely as good as Snow).

I still consider Hamauzu mediocre, by the way, and I've heard students of Conservatory that praise his take on game music. Furthermore, I find his work on SaGa Frontier II to be better than his latter apparitions in FFX, and despite the ear-worm property of Blinded by Light, I just don't feel attracted to the game at all, or its music. Sometimes, his take on classical music can be downright boring (the intro for USaga is pretty nice, but the title BGM is dull).

Hamauzu did fine work with the music in my opinion because the music never stuck out to me as improper. You can't point your finger to a place in the game and say, "NOPE! This music doesn't fit." Blinded by Light is beautiful, and Sabers Edge (boss music) has that dissonant piano that creates so much tense that it REALLY pumps me up. It's the first normal boss music that pumped me up since FFVII, and the boss music for Barthandelus is just phenomenal (I can't recall the name of the track itself). Hamauzu also worked with Nobuo on FFX I believe. It was the last time they worked together before he left to do solo work with The Black Mages and to do more freelance work.

It does bring a point, however: the music fits a much wider landscape. It gives an illusion of width to battles which are essentially the same as those of its predecessor (and take note that Sakimoto + Iwata do compositions that also take influences from classical music and take it one step further; my surprise to hear "Battle on the Bridge" from Final Fantasy Tactics had a movement by Stravinsky, told to me and shown to me by a classical composition graduate). Uematsu, on the other hand, has essentially developed the taste of most of us regarding RPG music, so it's shocking to observe the shift in composition focus.
By the way: I don't consider neither Hamauzu nor Uematsu as my favorite composer. Not even on my top 5. You may ask people here which are my top 5.

Given that point, doesn't that make Hamauzu's work a bit more impressive? I'm not a classical buff to your level, so I won't go into the details like you have here because it's not my field. I know enough to get by, but I know when I don't have enough knowledge to contribute to a conversation in a positive way.

Beg to ask why riding a motorcycle that sounds like a real one is important?

Recording foley is what I've been doing this summer, so I couldn't resist at poking fun at the sound they got for FFVII to represent Cloud's motorcycle. It sounds more like a slightly slowed down/pitch-shifted lawnmower than a real hog.

Perhaps those who are used to Yamahas aren't fans of the sound of choppers, mind you.

I actually prefer the sound of choppers over sports bikes. It goes to the muscle car roots I have.

Whether that's a reason why to like FFXIII...it's pretty flimsy, actually.

That's fine by me as that's your opinion. I still believe by giving a story driven level cap, healing after every battle, removing random encounters, and forcing people to fight bosses/strong enemies with an actual strategy is something the series never saw before was a refreshing change. They couldn't just mill out another game without trying new things. Some of the things I feel worked well, while others failed miserably. I knew my opinion wasn't going to be a popular one, but I stand by it regardless.

[T.G. Oskar]

Dissected, meaty answer. Me gusta.

Railroading is a pitfall that every GM every now and then falls into, and when that happens, if the NPCs/explaination is valid, it's justified to an extent. I don't like it when it happens, but I've already established that FFXIII failed to even try to not be linear without giving true side quest. They gave you hunts, like FFXII had, which wasn't really a side quest at all because it, "I had to kill this thing. I wish I could have done it. Do it for me please. I'll give you this item." without any variety. I wanted to point out that the game, outside of how linear it was, it had a strong point by incorporating true elements of strategy in battle by limiting your choices the characters could grow. Even after you unlock all the roles for every character, you still have clearly defined experts to certain roles (Hope was a rav/med but even when you max out his sent, he'll never be remotely as good as Snow).

The thing about railroading, as a GM, is to never make it obvious. If the party is willing to be railroaded, then use it to work with the adventure. However, at one moment, give them options. When the whole adventure is rail-roaded, and the players are unhappy by it, problems occur. There's conflict between the players and the GM, and the story ruins because the players insist on ruining the GM's plans while the GM uses every book at his disposal to return the players, by force, to the "right track".

On a game, when you feel the entire game does this, the same problem will occur: without the illusion of side-quests and the idea that you're doing something else, eventually you have two options. Either follow the track, or return the game. The other FF games have their sidequests to distract you from the main adventure, but they also have moments in which you might get further into a specific point of the adventure; FF7 had that impression once you get the Tiny Bronco, FF8 with Balamb Garden, and so on. FF10 has the same problem in that regard, because you're almost literally going on a rail.

Hamauzu did fine work with the music in my opinion because the music never stuck out to me as improper. You can't point your finger to a place in the game and say, "NOPE! This music doesn't fit." Blinded by Light is beautiful, and Sabers Edge (boss music) has that dissonant piano that creates so much tense that it REALLY pumps me up. It's the first normal boss music that pumped me up since FFVII, and the boss music for Barthandelus is just phenomenal (I can't recall the name of the track itself). Hamauzu also worked with Nobuo on FFX I believe. It was the last time they worked together before he left to do solo work with The Black Mages and to do more freelance work.

Given that point, doesn't that make Hamauzu's work a bit more impressive? I'm not a classical buff to your level, so I won't go into the details like you have here because it's not my field. I know enough to get by, but I know when I don't have enough knowledge to contribute to a conversation in a positive way.

First: classical buff? That's a new one. Anyone in this forum that knows me has it almost as a fact that I'm a sword buff, not a classical music buff. The whole reason I knew the Battle on the Bridge/Stravinsky comparison is because one of my D&D players is a graduate in Classical Composition, so it's expected for him to know that and point that out.

Second: I believe the question is better rephrased as "does the music make the scene, or does the scene make the music"? If the music makes the scene, then that shows a lot of Hamauzu's work but not enough of the game's shine: essentially, the game has to conform to the music. If the scene makes the music, then that doesn't make Hamauzu's work fantastic, it makes the scene fantastic. Try seeing a scene without music and see if it fits, then listen to the song, days later, and attempt to associate the feelings behind it and see if it fits the story. Sometimes, there may be certain cues to the story that fit the music (and viceversa), but the music turns great on its own when you listen to it and don't have to depend on the scene to generate that emotion.

Which leads me to "Blinded by Light". Perhaps it's me, but I'm used to intense battle themes with a lot of increasing tones, almost where it feels that the song rarely goes down. Battle themes for skirmishes have to be short but intensive; large-scale battle themes should essentially fade into the battleground and let the sounds of war take the scene, and boss battles should really grant the impression that the enemy you face is not normal. From what I can see in FF XIII, all battles are meant to hold that scale of "extremely difficult monsters, all unique in their own way", because of the impression of huge battlefields and large enemies. However, at the very least, they're mostly skirmishes, not large-scale battles. "Blinded by Light" was thought with the idea of enhancing that depth in battle, but would have fit better a large-scale battle. Take, for example, "Blinded by Light" and place it, say, at the very first scenes of "Lost Odyssey" (where Kaim is fighting a whole army by himself). Does the music fit better there than on a FF XIII combat scene, knowing that he's facing a lot of mooks but that you see thousands and thousands of them? "The Gun-Barrel of Battle" is Lost Odyssey's main battle theme, is used on that scene, and in every single battle scene aside from boss battles (and the Backyard, which has a funky yet awesome song). That song also has a sense of grandeur and large-scale, but tidbits where it fits skirmishes; the tempo makes the difference. The intensity section of "Blinded by Light" feels slower than the intensity section of "The Gun-Barrel of Battle", though on the former, you have the idea of a sort of flow.

Compare then to an ear-worm like the battle theme of Final Fantasy VIII or IX, or even "Normal Battle" of FFX. Compare the large-scale battles with Sakimoto's (and Iwata's) "Battle on the Bridge" or "Tension" or "Backfire". Compare how Sakimoto then does skirmish battle themes in Grand Knights History (damn you, Vanillaware!!!), such as "Fight On!" and "Nose-Bleed Charge!" (with their climaxes). Then go into really intense battle themes, such as Kenji Ito's battle theme for Romancing SaGa and how the arrangement from Tsuyoshi Sekito (from Black Mages fame) really makes every single battle feel epic; on the other hand, nearly every boss battle theme feels unique and awesome: "Haunted Melody" is eerie and placed within cavern battles, "A Piece of Courage" sounds awesome and inspiring when you're facing bosses in knightly territory, and then there's the themes for Death, Schirach, Saruin and his minions (Saruin has a two-parter which starts slow but then ends into pure awesomeness). Or, perhaps themes such as Motoi Sakuraba's work in Valkyrie Profile, the theme of Saturos and Menardi from Golden Sun (note that it had to be done on native GBA hardware), or what I'd dare say is his (and Gabriel Celeste's) leitmotif, "Incarnation of the Devil". That's the kind of intensity I'm used to, so I find Hamauzu's work dull because the intensity doesn't reach these grounds.

That's fine by me as that's your opinion. I still believe by giving a story driven level cap, healing after every battle, removing random encounters, and forcing people to fight bosses/strong enemies with an actual strategy is something the series never saw before was a refreshing change. They couldn't just mill out another game without trying new things. Some of the things I feel worked well, while others failed miserably. I knew my opinion wasn't going to be a popular one, but I stand by it regardless.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 made it better. That game is an indie game, even though their developers (Zeboyd Games) have notoriety by doing awesome 8-bit graphic games (BTW, this is their first foray into 16-bit graphic games). I finished their first game at the hardest difficulty. I sweared at how seemingly unfair it was to face essentially what was hand-picked groups of monsters, which essentially limited your XP growth. Sure, there was a grinding option (the Colosseum), but it was slow to develop and the monsters there were even harder to beat than what you faced on the next quest you had to follow. It's linear as heck (I'd say just as much, if not more linear, than FF XIII). And it uses a character development system that's essentially a rip-off of FFV.

That game has three times more strategic choices than FF XIII, and I say this with a straight face. You still had your specialists, and options were far more limited (besides your main class, you have access up to two more), and you can't shift them as you do in FF XIII. The game STILL has more strategic depth than FF XIII, if only because the difficulty essentially MADE you think out of strategy. Compare, also, the Insane Difficulty patch for Final Fantasy Tactics; the game has incredible depth in customization, but after grinding a bit the game turned out to be a joke. Then you get scaling enemies, enemies that have really specific tactics, better weapons, and better numbers, and you start figuring that grinding actually makes them more difficult, so it forces you to think, and think a lot, before making one step. Both games essentially forced the strategic choice by raising numbers, the cheapest trick in the book (literally, because it requires little tech knowledge in comparison to changing script altogether). FF XIII, on the other hand, has the same inflated numbers, but between the Auto-Battle option and the "Chain/Stagger for maximum damage" option, you get only the illusion of strategy. Even with specialists, the fact that you can change jobs literally on the fly (as with FF X-2) makes your strategy depend on mostly a mild amount of reflexes and the six slots of Paradigm Shifts. Then depend on essentially the same strategy: deal lots of damage, Stagger the enemy, Chain a lot for damage multipliers. Basically inflate damage to beat the inflated numbers, something that takes you back to square one.

Hopefully this'll be satisfying up until the next...say, two or three weeks. I dunno. Surprise me with your answers, everyone (not just EmperorLeo).